THE WAY 



Little Book of ChristianTraih 



— $» 



CHARLES M.JACOBS 




Pass cMII 

Book Tn 

Copyright^? 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE WAY 

A Little Book of Christian Truth 



"After the Way, which they call a sect, so serve 
I the God of my fathers." — Acts xxiv, 14 (R. V.) 



BY 

CHARLES M. JACOBS 



PHILADELPHIA, PA. 
THE CASTLE PRESS 



3Y\ 



COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
CHARLES M. JACOBS 



SEP 

(CI.A681713 



<Ti 



FOREWORD 

This little book is not a contribution to 
theology. If it contains any technicalities, 
the reader may be sure that they have 
escaped the writer's eye; and if, perchance 
it should come to any theologian's table, 
the writer asks that he lay it aside unread; 
it was not made for him. 

It is merely the setting down of the 
things that lie nearest the writer's heart. 
He believes that any man ought to be able 
to say in simple language the things that 
he really believes. After twenty years of 
preaching and teaching he has felt the need 
of putting in some connected form of plain 
words the convictions that he holds about 
the things that are most worth while. 

It has been written in the odd moments 
of a somewhat busy life, and is now offered 
to men and women who, amid the ques- 
tionings of an age that is not on the whole 
an age of faith, feel that they need some 



iv FOREWORD 

simple statement of elementary Christian 
truth. If it shall find a few such readers, 
and contribute somewhat to the strengthen- 
ing of their faith in Him Who is the Way, 
the Truth and the Life, it will have accom- 
plished the purpose to which it has been 
sent. 






CONTENTS 

I. The Church of Jesus Christ 7 

II. Human Nature ; . . 19 

III. Jesus 28 

IV. God 40 

V. Christ the Teacher of Right- 
eousness 57 

VI. Christ the Saviour 75 

VII. Faith 89 

VIII. The Holy Ghost 104 

IX. Means of Grace 115 

X. A Christian's Life 133 

XI. The Kingdom of God 149 

XII. The Christian Hope 168 

v 



THE WAY 



CHAPTER I 

The Church of Jesus Christ 

While Jesus was living on earth, He 
gathered around Him a small number of 
close followers. They were men and women 
who "believed on Him," that is, who had 
come to trust Him and were willing to obey 
Him. They had heard His teaching, and 
had learned to know His goodness and His 
power. They saw in Him the Only One 
Who could give them the comfort and the 
courage and the knowledge of truth which 
they needed in this life, and could make them 
certain that all would be well with them 
when this life was over. They saw in Him 
the link that connected them with God. 
They called Him "Master" and "Lord"; 
He called them "disciples," or "pupils." 

7 



8 THE WAY 

These men and women were the first mem- 
bers of the Christian Church- 
Jesus Himself said very little about the 
Church. He often spoke about u the king- 
dom of God," or "the kingdom of heaven," 
but that is not quite the same thing, though 
the thought of the Church and the thought 
of the kingdom are related. The name 
"Church" means "an assembly," "a gather- 
ing of people who have been called to- 
gether," "a mass-meeting," "a community." 
We know of only two times that Jesus used 
the word. Once He said, "If thy brother 
sin against thee .... tell it to the 
Church" 1 ; that might mean simply "the 
assembly of the brethren." The other time 
He said, "On this rock will I build My 
Church, and the gates of hell shall not pre- 
vail against it" 2 ; that evidently means some- 
thing more. 

After Christ's Ascension the word became 
more common. It was used most often by 
St. Paul. Sometimes it meant the society of 
Christian people living at a certain place, like 

1 Matthew xviii, 17. a Matthew xvi, 18. 



THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 9 

Ephesus or Corinth; sometimes it meant all 
the Christians in the world. But when Paul 
used the word in this larger meaning, it is 
clear that he thought of all these Christians 
as forming one single great society, as bound 
together into one great brotherhood, which 
is the Church. They make up one Body, of 
which Christ is the Head ; they form a single 
Temple, of which He is the Foundation 3 . 

By and by the name of "Church" came to 
have other meanings too. It was applied 
to those bodies of Christians which had 
bishops at their head; it was given to societies 
of Christians who had certain creeds ; it was 
given even to the buildings in which Christian 
people met for worship. But all of these 
meanings of the word are later than the time 
of the New Testament. 

Now, we have kept them all in constant 
use- We say, "Are you going to Church?", 
meaning, "Are you going to the Church- 
building?" or, "Are you going to a gathering 
for worship?" We ask, "To what Church 
do you belong?" and mean, "With what 
special society of Christian people are you 

* Ephesians ii, 20 ; iv, 4. 



10 THE WAY 

connected?'' We say, "The Church believes 
in Jesus Christ," meaning either, "That 
special society of Christians to which I belong 
believes in Christ," or, "All Christians be- 
lieve in Christ." We even speak of Jews 
"going to Church" though they do not 
believe in Christ at all. Thus, when we 
speak about the Church there are many 
things that we may mean, and those who 
hear us cannot be sure which one of them 
we really do mean; indeed, we are not 
always sure ourselves. Let us try to get 
this clear. 

The word Church, then, is a name for a 
great spiritual society. Its members are all 
those who believe in Jesus Christ, and accept 
Him as their Lord- That is the truest and 
largest meaning of the word. It is what 
Christian people ought to have in their 
minds when they say, "I believe in the Holy 
Catholic, or Christian, Church, the Com- 
munion of Saints." All those who accept 
Christ as their Lord, and trust Him to be 
their Saviour, their Guide and their Com- 
mander form one great spiritual brother- 



THE CHURCH OF CHRIST n 

hood. They belong to one another, because 
they belong to Christ. Their bodies may 
be tens or hundreds or thousands of miles 
apart, but that does not matter in the least. 
Wherever a man is with Christ, there a 
member of the Church is with the Church's 
Head, and there is the Church. Thus the 
Church can be, indeed it is, in a hundred 
places or a thousand places at the same 
time. No man can enter it unless he trusts 
Christ as his Lord; no man can be driven 
out of it, unless he ceases to trust in Christ; 
if that happens, nothing can keep him in the 
Church. 

Of course there can be only one such 
spiritual brotherhood, only one Church of 
Jesus Christ, but for that very reason, it must 
show itself in many places and in many 
forms. A single river, running under ground, 
rises to the surface in a thousand springs; 
a single vein of ore comes to the top of 
the earth in a hundred "outcroppings." So 
this one great Church of all Christians dis- 
plays itself in thousands of larger and 
smaller societies. These societies are made 
up of men and women who profess to be- 



12 THE WAY 

lieve in Christ. They have different names; 
they have different customs of worship, dif- 
ferent forms of organization; they differ in 
many of their beliefs; but in one thing they 
all agree, — they wish to be known as Chris- 
tian, they "profess Christ before men." In- 
dividual members of these societies may be 
hypocrites; they may be thoroughly wicked 
in their daily lives, but they want men to 
think of them as followers of Jesus and ser- 
vants of Christ. These societies, too, are 
called churches. 

These churches differ very greatly in size 
and extent. Some of them have millions of 
members, others have only hundreds; some 
of them are found in many lands, others in 
only a little corner of a single country. But 
each of them has its own distinguishing 
marks. It may be some special belief that 
is found only in that one group of Chris- 
tians; or it may be some special form of 
organization or government; or it may 
happen, especially in America, that two or 
more of these societies differ in little else 
than in the time and place of their origin. 
Thus we have a Baptist Church, which re- 



THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 13 

fuses baptism to children and baptizes adults 
only by immersion; we have a Presbyterian 
or "Elders' " Church, and an Episcopal, or 
"Bishops' " Church, named after the kind 
of organization which they believe all 
churches ought to have ; we have a Lutheran 
Church, teaching a view of Christianity 
that was first taught, in its completeness, in 
the time of the Reformation; we have a 
Roman Catholic Church, claiming that all 
Christians ought to be subject to the 
spiritual authority of the Bishop of Rome- 
On the other hand, we have some churches 
which differ very little from some of the 
rest, except that they have arisen at different 
times and in different lands. Everywhere 
we look, then, we see churches; indeed, we 
see so many of them that it is hard for us 
to realize that there is, after all, only one 
great spiritual brotherhood, of whose exist- 
ence these many churches are the sign. 

There are many good people, indeed, to 
whom these divisions are a cause of offence. 
They feel that we are doing wrong in keep- 
ing them alive; that we ought to do away 
with them as speedily as possible, and have 



14 THE WAY 

only one great organization in which all 
professing Christians would be numbered. 
And yet there is something to be said for 
the churches. There are important differ- 
ences between them. We do not all agree 
as yet; indeed, there are many very impor- 
tant things about which we entirely disagree. 
So long as this is true, it is better that we 
should have our many churches, each stand- 
ing for its own beliefs, than to have a single 
organization, filled with disagreement and 
contention. Our divisions are harmful only 
when they do not express real differences, 
or when they become the servants of in- 
tolerance and bigotry. 

There are two ways, then, in which we 
can rightly use the word "Church." We 
can use it of the great spiritual brotherhood 
of all believers in Jesus Christ, or we can 
use it of those societies of men and women 
who profess to believe in Him. 

As we look about us, and observe these 
societies of professing Christians actually at 
work, we notice that there are some things 
at which all of them are busy. Individuals 



THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 15 

may be cold or lukewarm toward these tasks, 
but the churches are working at them all 
the time. Indeed, it is for these tasks that 
they exist. 

For one thing, they are always declaring 
their faith in Jesus Christ as their Lord. 
That is one of the reasons why a man who 
really believes in Christ can hardly help 
belonging to a church. We can scarcely 
think of a man really believing in Christ and 
wishing to keep his faith concealed. He 
will almost certainly want other people to 
know about it. He will remember that Jesus 
said, "Whosoever shall confess Me before 
men, him w T ill I also confess before My 
Father which is in heaven." 4 He will recall 
Christ's word about the candle, "No man 
lighteth a candle and setteth it under a peck- 
measure, but placed it on a candle-stick." 5 
There have been times when it has been 
dangerous to be known as a Christian, but 
even in those times the more earnest be- 
lievers in Christ's lordship have been willing 
to let their faith be known- 

Again, they are always preaching the 
4 Matthew x, 32. 6 Matthew v, 15. 



16 THE WAY 

Gospel, telling and retelling the story of the 
life of Jesus and explaining and re-explain- 
ing the meaning of His life for men. They 
have two purposes in this. One of them is 
to make the faith of their own members 
stronger, to increase the measure of their 
devotion to the Christ Whom they have 
called their Lord; the other is to lead other 
men to that same faith, and thus increase 
the number of those who are followers of 
Christ. 

A third thing that all of them are doing 
is helping people to live according to the 
standards that Christ has set. They do this 
partly by preaching, partly by giving Chris- 
tians a chance to work together in deeds of 
love and mercy for their fellow men. We 
seldom realize how much the churches have 
accomplished by this patient and persistent 
preaching and illustrating of the standards 
of Jesus Christ, how they have made people 
think things wrong that everybody once 
thought right, how they have raised the pur- 
poses of men, and even of nations, above 
selfishness, how they have lifted burdens 
from the shoulders of the weak. 



THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 17 

We notice, too, that all of these churches 
regard their tasks as God-given. They are 
God's work, not their own. They labor at 
them because they know that these are the 
things that God wants done, and are sure 
that He has appointed them to do them. 
Therefore they work at them with gladness, 
for all their labor is just a part of the reason- 
able service which Christ has a right to ask 
of those who call him Lord and Master* 
They work at them with courage, because 
they feel themselves borne along by the 
power of God, and recall the words of Jesus, 
"On this rock will I build My Church, and 
the gates of hell shall not prevail against 
it." 6 

To sum it all up, then, in a few words! 
The greatest of all the spiritual facts of life 
is the lordship of Jesus Christ. He has a 
right to our trust and our obedience. When 
we acknowledge that right and yield Him 
our loyal allegiance, we enter at once into 
the spiritual brotherhood of the Church. 
But that brotherhood — to return to a figure 
that has been used before — is like a river 
•Matthew xvi, 18. 



18 THE WAY 

flowing under ground, which wells up to the 
surface in a thousand springs. Each one 
of those springs is the river; but it is the 
river at work, turning the desert into a 
garden, clothing the earth with green, giving 
life to man and beast. So the societies of 
Christians, which we call churches, are the 
Church; but they are the Church at w r ork, 
preaching the Gospel, spreading the message 
of the lordship of Jesus and the love of God, 
doing God's work of mercy, and thus adding 
continually to the spiritual brotherhood of 
those who believe in Christ. 



CHAPTER II 

Human Nature 

Christians are men and women. They have 
professed loyalty to Christ, and if they are 
true Christians they are really loyal to Him, 
but they have not got rid of their human 
nature. They never will be rid of it. If we 
wish to understand them, then, we must know 
something about this human nature. 

It is a strange thing, this human nature 
of ours. We all share it, and it might be 
supposed that we would know all about it, 
and yet most of us know it as little as the 
rain-drop knows the ocean, out of which it 
has come and into which it falls. The mass 
of it lies all around us, but only a few of us 
study it, and those few chiefly that they may 
take advantage of its weaknesses. It is the 
most changeable thing in creation, and the 
thing that changes least. It moves through 
history like a great tide, ebbing and flowing, 

19 



20 THE WAY 

rising and falling, taking on some new ap- 
pearance every instant, but remaining all the 
while the same. Indeed, the strangest thing 
about it is that it does not change. As far 
back as history reaches we find men fighting 
and loving and praying and cursing, just as 
they are doing today, and about the same 
things. That is why Jesus could say, "As 
it was in the days of Noah" — away back on 
the borderland of history — "so shall it be 
also in the days of the Son of Man" 1 — which 
will end recorded time. 

Now it stands to reason that our human 
nature has a great deal to do with our Chris- 
tianity, and so has what we think of our 
human nature. What we think of Christ 
depends very largely on what we think of 
ourselves, and what we think of ourselves 
depends very much on what we think of other 
men. The higher our opinion of men, the 
lower our opinion of Christ is likely to be. 
If we feel that men are good enough without 
Him, we shall not think very highly of Him; 
if we believe that everything would have 
gone along just as well if He had not been 

1 Luke xvii, 26. 



HUMAN NATURE 21 

born, then we shall not estimate the value 
of His coming very highly. On the other 
hand, if we are persuaded that Christ gives 
men something which it is necessary for them 
to have, takes away from our human nature 
some defects that are a part of it, and adds 
to it some element which only He can supply, 
then we shall look on Him very differently. 
That is, in fact, the way that we become 
Christians, for Christian loyalty to Christ is 
born, after all, in gratitude; "we love Him 
because He first loved us." 2 

When we come to study this human nature 
of ours, the very first discovery we make is 
that it has two sides, — a bright side and a 
dark side, a good side and a bad side- Not 
every man is willing to look at both of them. 
One man is an optimist about it; he sees 
only good in himself and his fellow-men and 
in the world. Another is a pessimist; he sees 
only the wrong and the evil. They argue 
vigorously which of them is right, when the 
truth is that neither of them is right, because 
neither of them will see all there is to see. 

a I John iv, 19. 



22 THE WAY 

Jesus saw both sides; He spoke of the world 
as a field where wheat and tares are growing 
up together. 3 

Now when we turn our eyes upon human 
nature, looking for the bright side which it 
may reveal to us, the first thing that im- 
presses us is its capacity for greatness. We 
are lost in astonishment at men's ability to 
do things. There is something awe-inspir- 
ing, for example, in the vast accumulation of 
knowledge that men have stored up. To be 
sure, the process of gathering that knowl- 
edge has been going on for centuries, but it 
has moved so rapidly in the last hundred 
years or so that it has become impossible for 
a single mind to keep track of it at all. Now 
and then this knowledge takes practical form 
in some spectacular achievement, — the send- 
ing of a message through the air, the flying 
of an airplane across an ocean. Even then 
we are scarcely surprised at it, for we have 
long since ceased to place a limit to the things 
that men can do. 

Tt is just as hard to set a limit to what 
men may become. The possibilities are too 

* Matthew xiii, 24-30. 



HUMAN NATURE 2 3 

great. A man may become almost anything. 
We see them coming up from the humblest 
beginnings to places where they control the 
earthly destinies of millions of their fellow- 
men. They seem to do this by a mysterious 
power that they possess, and there are so 
many cases of the kind that we conclude that 
the power must be a power of human nature. 
We see boys growing up to leadership among 
the thinkers of the world, thinking great 
thoughts and teaching others to think those 
same thoughts after them. Here and there 
we see in history the towering figure of some 
spiritual giant, some man who has risen to 
heights of character and wisdom; he may be 
long dead, but still he speaks; he becomes 
the teacher, the example, the inspiration of 
those who have come after him. These 
"super-men" are a constant warning against 
setting our estimate of human nature all too 
low. 

But human nature has another side, a dis- 
couraging and disheartening side. It is for- 
ever disappointing us- With all the possibili- 
ties of greatness which it has, it gets such a 
little way forward. The one man rises, the 



24 THE WAY 

many stay back; the one man shows what 
can be, the many show what is. Even the 
greatest and the best show themselves, when 
we come to see them closely, touched with 
weaknesses and faults which they ought not 
to have. They fail, somehow, to become 
quite all that they might be. 

Then, too, when we study these men who 
have grown up to what we call greatness, we 
find that all of them have had to fight their 
way up. They have had to contend with 
every kind of obstacle. Some of these ob- 
stacles have been deliberately thrown in their 
way by other men, but the most serious 
handicaps which they have had to overcome, 
have been those that were in themselves. 
They have had to resist a downward pull 
all the time, and when we look, as we some- 
times must, into our own lives we find that 
same downward pull at work on us. The 
drift of human nature is downward, not 
upward. 

And the most disappointing thing about 
this human nature of ours is its perpetual 
failure in goodness. We all know that 
failure; we find it in ourselves, we observe it 



HUMAN NATURE 25 

in other men. Of course, we have not all 
the same standards by which to judge it, one 
man's is higher than another's; and yet it is 
scarcely possible to find a man who will even 
pretend that he has actually lived up to the 
standards he accepts. We have to struggle 
toward them, advancing a little way and 
then slipping back, moving up again and once 
more falling down. We feel ourselves in 
constant battle with some hidden force. We 
cannot well define it, but we are conscious 
of its presence. It is working steadily to 
make it hard for us to do the things we know 
we ought to do and to become the kind of 
men we know we ought to be. We are con- 
scious that other men, too, are struggling 
just as we are, and we know that if any one 
of us lets go and stops fighting, he will slip 
down and down, till he has reached the 
bottom. What it means to be at the bottom 
of the human scale we can only dimly guess. 
We can imagine ourselves as vile as our vilest 
thought, as base as our most degraded im- 
pulse; but even then we have not fathomed 
the possibilities of evil that lie in human 
nature. 



26 THE WAY 

For it is human nature that is at fault. Its 
possibilities are as great one way as they 
are the other; we can no more set its down- 
ward than we can its upward limit Thus we 
find ourselves with endless possibilities both 
ways. Both are ours because we are human. 
They are the inheritance which we receive 
at birth. 

All of this we can learn without Christ. 
It is the simplest lesson of experience. The 
world is a place of struggle between good 
and evil, both of them making their home in 
us, and the advantage is on the side of evil. 
The Bible teaches the same truth. It tells 
us that we were "made in the image of God," 
carrying within us the possibility of heaven; 
it also tells us that we are "carnal, sold under 
sin," carrying within us something more than 
the mere possibility of evil. The everlast- 
ing problem of humanity is, "How to defeat 
the evil and move upward toward the best." 

Christians find the answer in Jesus Christ. 
He gives us a goal and the power to live 
toward it. He shows us human nature at 
its supreme best, setting us a standard by 



HUMAN NATURE 27 

which to measure all goodness. And then, 
when the real evil of our human nature comes 
into clearest light, He gives the power by 
which we can grow upward to the goodness 
that He has shown. Thus He becomes a 
source of gladness and confidence and 
courage. 



CHAPTER III 

Jesus 

Christianity is the religion of Jesus Christ. 
It is the religion He lived and taught; it is 
also the religion of which He is the center. 
It is therefore, in the strictest sense, an his- 
torical religion, for it had its origin in a defi- 
nite place and at a time that we can fix, it 
had its complete expression in a human life, 
and it centers around a Person Who has 
actually lived among men. That Person is 
Jesus of Nazareth. 

Along the Eastern coast of the Mediter- 
ranean Sea, and stretching but a few miles 
back into the mountains, lies the land that 
we know as Palestine- For many centuries 
it was the home of the Jewish people. In 
this land and among this people Jesus lived. 
His home was a little village close up by 
the northern hills of Galilee. Out of this 
village Jesus went to become a public teacher 

28 



JESUS 29 

of religion. He was about thirty years of 
age when His teaching-years began, and 
there is nothing to show that before then 
He had ever attracted any special attention 
to Himself. In three short years, or less, 
the work of His life was done. In those 
years He had no home, and no friends 
except the little group of pupils whom He 
gathered around Him. "Foxes have holes, 
and the birds of the air have nests, " He said 
once, "but the Son of Man hath not where 
to lay His head." 1 Another time He said, 
"Whosoever doeth the will of God he is 
My mother and sister and brother." 2 Judged 
by their consequences to the world, no other 
three years in all the centuries of human his- 
tory have been so fruitful. The seeds of 
truth that Jesus sowed in those years have 
been bearing fruit in all the centuries that 
have followed, and still are bearing fruit 
today. 

To be sure, the soil into which that seed 
was sown had already been prepared for it. 
That is what St. Paul meant when He said, 

1 Matthew viii, 20. 2 Mark iii, 35. 



THE WAY 30 

"In the fullness of the times, God sent forth 
His Son." 3 The people among whom Jesus 
lived was a religious people. Their religion 
was peculiarly their own; no other people 
shared it. They believed in the One God, 
while others believed in many gods ; they had 
a religious law of righteousness higher than 
any other nation had ever had; they had 
done more thinking, and clearer and truer 
thinking, about God and righteousness and 
truth than had been done by any others. This 
had prepared them for the work that Jesus 
was to do, and men who believe in Jesus 
look back now to the time when this pre- 
paration was going on and see in it the work 
of God Himself. 

Thus Jesus did not have to begin at the 
beginning, as does a Christian teacher who 
goes into a heathen land today. The foun- 
dations were already laid- The people to 
whom He came had u the law and the 
prophets." For centuries, too, they had 
been expecting the advent of a great reli- 
gious leader whom God was to send. They 
spoke of this Expected One as the "Mes- 

3 Galatians iv, 4. 



JESUS 31 

siah," the "Anointed." When Jesus came, 
He claimed that name for Himself. He has 
it still in the name of "Christ," which means 
"Messiah." He took the religion of the 
Jews as true within its limits, and trans- 
formed it into a new religion, deeper and 
broader and more wonderful. He could say, 
"Ye have heard that it hath been said to 
them of old time," and quote the sacred writ- 
ings of the Jews, adding, "But I say unto 
you." 4 

The teaching of Jesus drew to Him the 
attention of great crowds of people. They 
found in it things that made them think more 
deeply and more seriously than ever they 
had thought before. He touched their con- 
sciences and made them feel that they were 
sinners, because He set the standards of 
human character higher than ever any one 
had done. He taught them that a lustful 
thought broke the commandment against 
adultery, that anger violated the command, 
"Thou shalt not kill." 5 He taught the evil 
of selfishness as it had never been taught, 

4 Matthew v, 21. 5 Matthew v, 2iff. 



32 THE WAY 

and the men who heard His words learned 
from Him that selfishness is the one great 
sin that is always dragging human nature 
down. He tore away the cloak of self- 
righteousness and self-conceit that was mak- 
ing some men think themselves perfect, and 
men who were looked upon as saints found 
themselves pictured in His teaching as 
"white-washed sepulchres, outwardly beauti- 
ful, but inwardly full of dead men's bones 
and all uncleanness." 6 It was a terrifying 
and humiliating message that Jesus preached 
to men who thought that human nature was 
very good, for He taught that human nature 
is not good as long as it has room for selfish- 
ness of any kind and still retains a single 
weakness or a single fault. 

Nor was Jesus' teaching the only thing 
about Him that made men think. He actually 
lived the standards which He taught. That 
is one of the great differences between Him 
and all other teachers. Many men have 
given the world high and noble thoughts 
about life and character and conduct, though 

e Matthew xxiii, 27. 



JESUS 33 

none of them, not even the very greatest, 
has ever approached in his teaching the pure 
perfection of the thought of Jesus; but none 
of them has lived out his teaching as Jesus 
did. With enemies all around Him, seeking 
some flaw in His character which they might 
make a ground of accusation, he went quietly 
about His work, and foiled them by the 
completeness of His holiness. Most wonder- 
ful of all, the men who knew Him best, who 
lived with Him day by day for most of those 
three years, thought of Him at last as God, 
and called Him God; so completely did He 
satisfy the pure and lofty ideas of what God 
ought to be, which they had learned partly 
as Jews, partly as His disciples. 

Yet Jesus was not content to speak to men 
only about themselves. He was a teacher not 
of morality, but of religion. Thus He was 
always talking about God. The idea that 
there can be any goodness apart from God 
is altogether foreign to Jesus' thinking. A 
human life is good only insofar as God is in 
it; a man's character grows only as God's 
will becomes its law; the acts of his life are 



34 THE WAY 

good only when he purposes the thing that 
God desires. A man can grow in goodness, 
therefore, only by relying upon a power that 
is higher and a will that is purer than his 
own; he can put the selfishness out of his 
life only by putting something else into it, 
substituting the will of God for the will of 
self. This reliance upon God is faith, and 
faith takes all the worry and anxiety out of 
life. The man who believes in God, who 
trusts Him and follows His leading, can go 
through hardship and sorrow and privation 
and suffering with a quiet mind. "Why are 
ye fearful, O ye of little faith?" 7 was His 
reproving question when His disciples were 
frightened by the nearness of death. "Why 
do you worry? Think of the birds and the 
flowers," He said in the Sermon on the 
Mount. 8 He taught His disciples, when they 
prayed to say, "Our Father Who art in 
heaven," 9 and His teaching was full of the 
thought of the heavenly Father's love. The 
God He wanted men to trust and to 
obey was a God to be loved, not to 

'Matthew viii, 26. 8 Matthew vi, 28ff. 'Matthew 
vi, 9. 



JESUS 35 

be feared, and He called His message 
an "Evangel," a "message of good." 

But the things that Jesus said about Him- 
self were quite as strange and wonderful as 
the things He taught men about God. The 
power of His teaching to grip the consciences 
of men seems to have lain quite as much in 
the way He taught it as in what He taught. 
"He taught as one having authority," St. 
Matthew tells us, "and not as the scribes." 10 
"Never man spake as this man," 11 was the 
verdict of those who heard Him, and more 
than once the writers of the life of 
Jesus tell us that "All the people were 
astonished." 12 

For one thing, there was a sureness about 
His way of teaching which showed that He 
was Himself convinced of the truth of what 
He said, even when it was new and strange ; 
and yet there was about Him no trace of 
self-conceit, no sign of any desire to make 
Himself great. "If I bear witness of My- 
self," He said to the Jews, "My witness is 

"Matthew vii, 29. "John vii, 46. 

"Matthew vii, 28; xxii, 33; Mark i, 22, etc. 



36 THE WAY 

nothing." 13 All through His life, by word 
and act, He showed that He felt Himself 
perfectly at one with God and, therefore, 
when He spoke to men, He expected that 
they would listen to Him as though God 
Himself were speaking. He called God 
"My Father"; He said, "I honor My 
Father, of Whom ye say that He is your 
God." 14 When He asked His disciples who 
they thought He was, and Peter answered, 
u Thou art the Son of the living God," He 
said, "Blessed art thou, Simon, for flesh and 
blood have not revealed this unto thee, but 
My Father which is in heaven" 15 He told 
His little group of friends, before His Pas- 
sion, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the 
Father," 16 and again, "I and My Father 
are one." 17 Thus the men who knew Him 
best gradually came to think of Him as more 
than merely man; they believed in Him as 
God. 

Their belief in Him was all the stronger 
because of the miracles He did. Legend has 

"John v, 31. 14 John viii, 49, 54. 

15 Matthew xvi, 16, 17. lfl John xiv, 9. 

"John x, 30. 



JESUS 37 

woven wonderful stories about the lives of 
many men, and Jesus is not the only character 
in history of whom miracle-stories are told. 
If we were asked to believe Him more than 
man only because He performed miracles, 
we might hesitate to give these stories cred- 
ence, but the claims of Jesus do not rest 
upon His miracles. "Believe that I am in 
the Father and the Father in Me, or else 
believe Me for the works' sake," 18 He said 
once. He was continually resisting the crav- 
ing of the curious for miracles, and when 
He did perform one, it was to teach some 
lesson about the love of God, never to make 
men think more highly of Himself. The 
character of Jesus is our strongest ground 
for believing the stories of His miracles, but 
those who saw the miracles found them addi- 
tional reason for looking up to Him as God. 

This wonderful life went out, after three 
years of constant blessing, in agony and 
shame. The official heads of His own people, 
their teachers of religion, saw in Him an 
enemy. His teaching was something new; 

18 John xiv, ii. 



38 THE WAY 

it would have made the religion of Israel a 
new religion; it would have changed their 
religious law and custom. The real truth 
is that the religion of Jesus was not thought 
"practical" ; even today there are many who 
do not so regard it. He was accused of 
blasphemy, of "making Himself equal with 
God," tried and convicted and handed over 
to the Roman rulers of Palestine to be put 
to death. Afterwards His disciples remem- 
bered that He made no effort to resist or to 
escape; on the contrary, He went to meet 
His sufferings as the fulfillment of the 
Father's will for Him. They crucified Him. 
He died the death of exquisite torture that 
Rome reserved for criminals; but even the 
agony of it failed to break the consciousness 
that He was one with God. His body was 
laid in a tomb, and the three busy years of 
"Gospeling" were over. His disciples were 
discouraged and disheartened. They thought 
this was the end. 

Then came the most wonderful chapter 
in the life of Jesus. On the third day after 
His burial, the tomb where He had lain was 



JESUS 39 

empty, and before that day was over the dis- 
ciples, who were mourning Him as dead, 
had seen Him and talked with Him- They 
saw Him at more than one time and in more 
than one place; they believed, indeed, that 
He had come back to live with them again. 
But just when they were beginning to think 
that He was with them to stay, He disap- 
peared. "A cloud received Him out of their 
sight." 19 The eyes of men saw Him no more, 
but His disciples knew that He was living. 
He Who had come from God, had now re- 
turned to God. His life had been loaned 
for a little while to the world that the world 
might always be the richer for what He had 
brought it; and now that life had gone back 
to Him Who sent, leaving two promises, — 
"I go to prepare a place for you, that where 
I am, there ye may be also"; and "I will 
come again and take you unto Myself." 20 
Then, in the circle of those who had known 
Jesus best, was told the story of His birth, — 
of how His mother was a virgin, and of 
how the angels sang above the fields of 
Bethlehem the night that He was born. 

19 Acts i, 9. ^John xiv, 2, 3. 



CHAPTER IV 

God 

What do we mean by God? To many 
people that may seem an altogether useless 
question. They will say, "As soon ask what 
we mean by St. Paul or St. John; no one 
has ever tried to define them, but there were 
people once who knew them, and we know 
about them what these people have told us; 
in the same way, there have been people who 
have known God and have told us about 
Him." That is the way the common man 
looks at it. To his way of thinking God 
is "just God," a Person Whom he has never 
seen, but Whom he believes to exist; a 
Person of Whom he is willing to be told, but 
about Whom he wants to hear no argument. 

Now there is something to be said for that 
view of the matter. For one thing, it is the 
view of the men who wrote the books of the 
Bible. You may search the Bible from cover 
to cover, and nowhere will you find a defini- 

40 



GOD 41 

tion of God, though His name is on almost 
every page. The men who wrote those 
books were men who had learned to know 
God by living with Him ; they were the kind 
of people of whom Jesus said, "Blessed are 
the pure in heart, for they shall see Him." 1 
These men have set down for other people 
the things that they learned of God. 

The one Person from Whom we learn the 
most about God is, of course, Jesus Christ- 
Those who have faith in Him believe that 
if we really want to know God at all, we 
must go to Christ for our knowledge, for- 
getting everything else that has ever been 
said or written about God until after we 
have learned what Christ has to teach us. 
Jesus Himself said, "He that hath seen Me 
hath seen the Father" 2 ; "If ye had known 
Me, ye would have known My Father also" 3 
and John writes, "No man hath seen God 
at any time, the Only-begotten Son hath de- 
clared Him." 4 Our knowledge of God must 
start with Christ. 

1 Matthew v, 8. 

3 John xiv, g. 3 John viii, 19. 

4 John i, 18 



42 THE WAY 

But that is the very thing that most of 
our thinking about God does not do; it does 
not start with Christ at all. At best our 
thought of God is only partly Jesus' thought. 
Our minds are full of notions about Him 
that have drifted into them from elsewhere, 
and we use the knowledge that we get from 
Christ to piece out these other notions. And 
so, because our knowledge does not start 
with Christ, it is not really Christian knowl- 
edge; sometimes, indeed, it is little more 
than heathenism, plus some ideas that have 
come from Christ. 

Of course, that puts the question, "What 
do we mean by God?" in a very different 
light. It is not a useless question after all, 
but a very necessary question, and one that 
we ought to ask. 

Most of us would agree that, when we 
hear the name of God, the very first thing 
that comes into our minds is the thought of 
One Who can do everything. God is a Being 
of unlimited and illimitable power. What- 
ever else He may be, He must be the 



GOD 43 

Almighty. That marks the difference be- 
tween Him and us, — we are weak and He is 
strong. All our life long we are more or 
less completely at the mercy of conflicting 
forces which push us this way and that, and 
finally swallow us up. We think of God as 
the One Who controls these forces. Some- 
where in, or above, this world that frames 
us and sustains us and at last destroys us, 
there is One Who is this world's Master. 
We feel that it must be so, though we do 
not always think it out. 

Now that idea may be Christian; it may 
also be heathen, for the heathen have it too. 
The Norseman saw the swift stroke of the 
lightning and said, "It is Thor; he has 
thrown his hammer again" ; the Persian saw 
the sun riding high in the deep blue Oriental 
sky, and said, "It is Mithra; he is on his 
w r ay once more"; the Romans saw the grain 
silently ripening in the fields, and said, "It 
is Ceres; she is sending us another harvest." 
The heathen are thinking always of the 
things men cannot do, and then of God as 
the One Who can do them- They think and 
talk of God in terms of power. 



44 THE WAY 

We, too, believe that God is the Almighty, 
but when, in thinking of Him, we make His 
almightiness the first thing and the main 
thing, we are thinking like the heathen, not 
like Christ. Jesus never put that first. In- 
deed, one of the things that Jesus has to 
teach us about God is that there are some 
things God cannot do; not because He has 
not the power, but because the doing of them 
would be wrong. Jesus Himself could feed 
a crowd of people by a miracle, but He could 
not feed Himself when He was hungry in 
the wilderness, because it would have been 
a sin; He could raise Lazarus from the dead, 
but He could not come down from the Cross. 
So God could raise Jesus from the dead, but 
He could not take from His lips the bitter 
cup of sorrow in Gethsemane. Why did not 
God prevent the awful suffering and sorrow 
of the Great War? Thousands have asked 
that question, thinking only of the almighty 
power, which is the first thing in their thought 
of Him. Many of these questioners, finding 
no answer to their question, have said, at 
last, u there is no God." But the simple 
answer is, u God could not n ; not because He 



GOD 45 

had not the power, but because, even in God, 
there is something higher than power. 

A second thing that always enters into our 
thought of God is the idea that He is some- 
how interested in the lives of men. A God 
without a purpose or a plan would be no 
god at all. Of course, that limits our thought 
of what God can do; for He must use His 
power to carry out His purpose, He cannot 
act for the defeat of His own plan. But we 
are all very sure that we are some way in- 
cluded in that purpose. He is not indifferent 
to what happens in the world; least of all 
is He indifferent to what we are and how 
we act. That is what we mean when we 
speak about u the will of God for men." 

That, too, is an idea that may be Christian 
and may be heathen. Others than Chris- 
tians believe that God is interested in human 
affairs, far enough, at least, to give men 
laws which they must obey. He sets them 
tasks which they must perform on pain of 
His displeasure, and there are some things 
that men can do which make God pleased 
with them, and ready to reward them. Thus 



46 THE WAY 

the religion of many people consists in doing 
certain things to keep God from being angry 
with them, and doing certain other things to 
earn His rewards. Sometimes it is acts of 
ritual which are believed to keep God's anger 
off, — a sacrifice of blood, an offering of rice, 
the repetition of some form of sacred words; 
sometimes it is obedience to a code of law 
which He is believed to have given, govern- 
ing with iron rules the life of every day; but 
all the while these people, when they think 
of God, think of Him as a taskmaster, 
holding men to His will through fear of 
what will happen if they fail. Their idea of 
the tasks, which they believe that He has 
set, is not always the same; but one thing 
they have in common, — the fear of the 
Almighty Lawgiver which spurs them on to 
duty; and always there is the expectation of 
some rich reward to encourage them in the 
doing of His will 

We also believe that God is interested in 
the affairs of men. No one ever had more 
to say about the "will of God for men" than 
Jesus had; upon no other life has God's will 
ever rested with such complete authority as 



GOD 47 

it rested on the life of Christ. How often 
Jesus said, "I must!" Hear Him saying, 
"I must work the works of Him that sent 
me" 5 ; "The Son of Man must suffer many 
things." 6 Hear Him praying, "Let this cup 
pass from Me, nevertheless not My will, but 
Thine, be done." 7 Hear Him teaching His 
disciples, when they pray, to say, "Thy will 
be done." 8 But even Jesus, when He spoke 
of God, did not start with the thought of 
His will for men. Of God's will, as well as 
of God's power, we are compelled to say, 
"There is something higher." 

Another thing about which most men are 
agreed is that God is difficult of access. He 
is hidden behind things; we see the things, 
but Him we do not see. Seek for Him as 
we may, He eludes our search. The signs 
of Him are all around us, — in the stars that 
keep their ceaseless, silent vigil over the 
changing world; in the gold of the sunset 
sky and the soft beauty of the wayside 
flower; in the roar of the winter wind and 

5 John ix, 4. 6 Mark viii, 31. 7 Luke xxii, 42. 
8 Matthew vi, 10. 



48 THE WAY 

the crash of the summer thunder; in the 
mystery of life, and in the longings of the 
souls of men. But when we seek to find God 
in things, it seems that they are only His 
garment of concealment after all. It is as 
though He had just been here, but the 
moment of our seeking finds Him gone. It 
is only when He chooses to be found that 
men can discover Him, only when He lifts 
the veil that they can see Him; only when 
He breaks the silence that they can hear His 
voice. And yet we all believe that He has 
been heard and seen. We believe that some 
men, favored above their fellows, have actu- 
ally known Him, and learned from Him 
what is His will. To these men we go for 
our knowledge of Him. 

And there, once more, we have an idea 
that may be Christian, and may not. Many 
religions have their soothsayers and their 
oracles, and to them men go when they want 
to know the will of God. The idea of 
"revelation," the notion that this hidden 
God makes Himself known through chosen 
spokesmen, is common to almost all reli- 
gions. Priests and prophets and preachers 



GOD 49 

and teachers are regarded as means through 
which we gain access to the hidden God and 
through which He speaks to men. 

In all these things, then, there is nothing 
that is peculiarly Christian. The idea that 
God is a Being of almighty power, with a 
sovereign will that all men must obey, Who 
makes Himself known to men through reve- 
lation, is one that a man may hold without 
being a Christian at all; he may be a Jew 
or a Mohammedan. That is why it w T as 
said, a little way back, that many of our 
ideas about God are heathen notions, pieced 
out with some notions which we get from 
Christ. In our thinking about God, the main 
thing is to get started right. If we want to 
have a Christian God, we must make our 
start where Christ makes His. 

The word that best describes Christ's 
starting-point is probably character. The 
use of the word suggests a resemblance be- 
tween man and God. It is a man's character 
that decides what a man wants and what he 
will strive to get. It determines the direction 



50 THE WAY 

of his will and fixes the objects to which he 
will apply whatever power he has. Really 
to know a man, it is necessary to know his 
character. The same thing is true about 
our knowledge of God. It is not enough 
to know Him as almighty power or sover- 
eign will, but if we wish our thought of Him 
to be complete, we must know what is back 
of His will and what decides the way that 
He will use His power. 

Now that is the very thing Christ tells 
us. It is in the showing forth of God's 
character that His revelation of God con- 
sists. Indeed, it was because they found in 
Him an idea of God which surpassed any- 
thing they had ever imagined that Christ's 
disciples called Him God. He satisfied 
their feeling of what God ought to be. It 
is for that same reason that Christians ever 
since have been confessing, "I believe in 
Jesus Christ, His Only Son, our Lord." For 
Jesus did something more than teach men 
about God. He actually lived out His teach- 
ing about God in just the same way that He 
lived out His teaching about men. He 
showed men how God would act in human 



GOD 51 

surroundings. That is why we always have 
to explain Christ's words by what He did, 
His life by what He said- 

The first thing that we learn from Jesus 
about the character of God is that He is 
holy, and holiness means complete and per- 
fect goodness. When we say that God is 
holy, we mean that we can apply to Him 
the highest human standards of goodness, 
and He will more than satisfy them. The 
things that we compel ourselves to do be- 
cause they are our duty, God does because 
it is His nature to do them. That which is 
in us a law imposed upon our lives from 
outside of them, is in God a law of His own 
being. All of us have an instinctive feeling 
of what goodness is, and when we have 
learned from Christ to think of God as 
above all things a holy God, we are con- 
vinced that this feeling must come to us 
from God Himself; we believe that our con- 
science is, in some true sense, a revelation 
of His will. The defects in goodness which 
we find in ourselves have no place at all 
in God and His holiness is the one true and 



52 THE WAY 

perfect standard of goodness for all men. 
The whole law of God for Christians is 
summed up in the one commandment, "Be 
holy, as He Who has called you is holy." 9 
To be good means to be like God in charac- 
ter, so that our good deeds come out of a 
good desire, a purpose which is not only like, 
but really is, God's own. That is the whole 
meaning of Christ's teaching about righteous- 
ness in the Sermon on the Mount. 

It is scarcely necessary to say that this 
thought of character as the chief thing in 
God changes our ordinary notion of God's 
power. It limits the things that God can 
do. It makes it very clear that there are 
some things He cannot do. He can do 
nothing that conflicts with His goodness ; He 
must do everything that helps to establish 
his own goodness among men. His purpose 
cannot be to set men tasks or to make men 
fear Him and acknowledge His almighti- 
ness; on the other hand, it must have some- 
thing to do with the victory of goodness 
over everything that is not good. 

•I Peter i, 15. 



GOD 53 

That means, of course, that God's rela- 
tions with men are relations of char- 
acter, not of force. He is interested 
in men's affairs not for His own sake 
but for their sake, not to compel them 
to do something for Him but to make them 
partakers of His own goodness. For God's 
holiness is the holiness of love, and love is 
unselfishness. That is the supreme lesson 
that we learn from Jesus. The complete 
unselfishness of His life is the revelation of 
what God is. Looking back upon that life, 
and remembering what he had heard of 
Jesus and what he had seen in Him, John 
said, "God is love." 10 He gave everything, 
He took nothing- He denied Himself and 
sacrificed Himself to the uttermost for men, 
in order that men might learn to deny them- 
selves and sacrifice themselves for Him and 
for their fellow-men, and thus become like 
Him, — that is to say, like God. 

It was to make this clear that Jesus used 
the name "Father," when He talked of God. 
No single word was oftener upon His lips. 
He called God "my Fathef," but He also 

10 1 John iv, 8, 16. 



54 THE WAY 

called Him "your Father," and He taught 
people to pray, "Our Father, Who art in 
heaven." He makes us think of humanity 
as one great family of brothers, with the 
life of the one Father in them all. They 
may not know that they are brothers. They 
may hate one another and oppress one an- 
other and rob and kill one another, but they 
are brothers still. They may not know their 
Father, or love Him or obey Him, but He 
is their Father still. Indeed, the fatherhood 
of men over their children is only the earthly 
image of the Fatherhood of God. "If ye, 
who are evil," said Jesus once, "know how 
to give good gifts unto your children, how 
much more shall your Father which is in 
heaven give good things to them that ask 
him." 11 

When once we get Christ's idea of God's 
Fatherhood, it changes our whole thought 
about "the will of God." It is not at all 
the will of a despot, who makes what laws 
he pleases and compels men to obey them, 
but the will of a Father, Who is always 
seeking His children's good. And just be- 

11 Matthew vii, n. 



GOD 55 

cause He is our Father, we can trust Him 
and obey Him gladly and pray to Him and 
make His will our law. That is why Jesus 
says that it is wrong for men to worry about 
anything, because there is always the heav- 
enly Father to care for them; that is why 
St. Paul can say that u Love is the fulfilling 
of the law." 12 

Then, too, this truth about the character 
of God changes the common notion that 
God is hard to find. To be sure, it does not 
answer all our questions about God, but it 
does give us all the knowledge that we need 
in order to grow like Him. He is not the 
hidden God, who occasionally lifts the veil 
of darkness that conceals Him and gives 
some favored mortal a brief glimpse of His 
glory and His truth. He is not the silent 
God, Who speaks in riddles through some 
mysterious oracle, or now and then in tones 
of thunder to an awe-struck world, or whis- 
pers a word in the ear of a sleeping prophet, 
to be by him imparted to mankind. He is 
a God Who is standing all the time in the 
full view of men who will not look His way; 

12 Romans xiii, 10. 



56 THE WAY 

Who is speaking all the time to men who 
will not listen- We still believe that He 
cannot be known unless He reveals Himself, 
but that does not matter in the least, because 
He has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. 



CHAPTER V 
Christ the Teacher of Righteousness 

Jesus has brought the world a message 
about God and taught us how to think of 
Him. But He has done more than that, 
for He has taught us what human goodness 
is. He has given us a standard by which 
to measure it, a test by which we may dis- 
cover whether it is in ourselves. He is Him- 
self this standard. Instead of a law spoken 
from a distant mountain-top, telling us what 
to do, we, who are Christians, have in Jesus 
Christ a law lived out in the words and 
deeds of a human life, showing us what to 
be. We find it in His teaching, for He has 
spoken the last word about human good- 
ness. We find it in his living, for we see in 
Him the perfect illustration of the perfect 
law and interpret all other law by what we 
find in Him. Let us try to see, then, what 
this law of Jesus is. 

57 



58 THE WAY 

The very first thing that we learn from 
Jesus is that goodness is a matter of char- 
acter. There is no goodness except in a 
person who is good. There is goodness in 
God; there may be goodness in the secret 
places of a human life ; but there is no good- 
ness anywhere else, not in the words we 
speak or the acts we do. It is not a veneer 
laid on life's surface, covering life's ugliness 
with a layer of beauty. It is rather a quality 
of life itself. It touches men's thoughts and 
desires at their very source and gives them 
purpose and direction. 

It is this elementary truth that Jesus was 
declaring when He talked about the good 
tree which is sure to bring forth good fruit 
and the evil tree which is just as sure to 
bring forth evil fruit. 1 "The good man," 
He said again, "out of the good treasure 
of his heart, bringeth forth that which is 
good, and the evil man out of the evil 
treasure of his heart bringeth forth that 
which is evil; for out of the abundance of 
the heart the mouth speaketh" 2 He said 
that the kingdom of heaven is like a little 

1 Matthew vii, 17, 18. 3 Luke vi, 45. 



CHRIST THE TEACHER 59 

leaven, which spreads through a mass of 
flour and saturates the dough with its own 
quality. 3 He also spoke about u the leaven 
of the Pharisees" 4 as a thing to beware of, 
meaning the evil at the center which corrupts 
the whole of life. 

That was Christ's constant quarrel with 
the sham-saints of His day, — either they 
did not know, or else they had forgotten, 
this simple truth about goodness. He called 
them " white-washed sepulchres, which out- 
wardly appear beautiful, but inwardly are 
full of dead men's bones and all unclean- 
ness." 5 He told them that they were busy 
cleaning the outside of the cup, and never 
washed the inside; He called them "offspring 
of vipers," and asked them how they ex- 
pected to escape the damnation of hell. 6 
This from the mild and gentle Jesus, Whose 
life was spent in deeds of kindness and acts 
of love and pity; Who said, "Come unto 
Me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden 
and I will give you rest!" 7 It almost seems 

3 Matthew xiii, 33. 4 Matthew xvi, 6. 
5 Matthew xxiii, 27. 6 Matthew xxiii, 33. 7 Matthew 
xi, 28. 



60 THE WAY 

as though there were no words strong 
enough to express His indignation when He 
thought about them. And yet, when He had 
to do with a woman taken in adultery, He 
said to her simply, "Neither do I condemn 
thee; go, and sin no more." 8 The difference 
was that they were hypocrites; they pre- 
tended to be one thing, while they were 
really something else. They believed that 
they were good because they did the kind of 
thing that good people were expected to do. 
Thus they were living a lie, because in the 
effort to act like good men, they forgot to 
cultivate the quality of goodness in their 
own secret souls. They were not genuine. 
He had the same contention with the reli- 
gion of His day. It was formal and con- 
ventional. It belonged to the outside of 
life. A man who did not kill anybody 
thought that he was keeping the command- 
ment, "Thou shalt not kill"; a man who did 
not yield his body to the temptation of the 
flesh thought that he was pure. Christ saw 
it differently. He declared that the angry 
thought which issues in a curse is really the 

8 John viii, i-ii. 



CHRIST THE TEACHER 61 

sin of murder; that the consent of a man's 
will to a thought of lust is really the sin of 
adultery. The public exercises of religion — 
the fastings and the prayers and the charities 
done in the sight of men — meant nothing, 
unless there was behind them the real desire 
to be obedient to God. Jesus observed the 
religious customs of His people with the 
most scrupulous care, but He told the woman 
of Samaria, "The Father seeketh those to 
worship Him who worship Him in spirit 
and in truth." 9 

Thus, in all His teaching, Jesus was try- 
ing to get men away from the idea of good- 
ness as something that lies upon life's sur- 
face and works into it from the outside. He 
wanted them to see in it something that a 
man is. We ourselves are either good or 
bad, and it is our goodness, or badness, that 
gives goodness, or badness, to the things we 
do and say. They are the expression of 
our characters. 

That was Christ's teaching, and when we 
turn from His words to His life, we find 
that teaching translated into action. We are 

•John iv, 23. 



62 THE WAY 

so accustomed to the Gospel story that we 
can hardly realize just how a life like His 
must have appeared to the men who saw 
and knew Him. He defied the conventions 
of morals and religion, not because they 
were conventions, but because they became 
a hindrance to His work. There was no 
law that a pious Jew respected and kept 
more carefully than the law of the Sabbath- 
rest, but Jesus broke it, openly and publicly, 
when He healed the sick upon the Sabbath 
day. Good men looked on w T ith amazement, 
when they saw this teacher, Who had said, 
"Except your righteousness shall exceed the 
righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, 
ye shall not enter the kingdom," 10 doing 
things that no scribe or Pharisee would have 
dreamed of doing. He associated with open 
sinners, He dined with notorious characters; 
people said, "Behold a wine-bibber," 11 "This 
man receiveth sinners, and eateth with 
them." 12 Even His own disciples were 
astonished when they returned from Sychar 
and found Him talking with a Samaritan 

10 Matthew v, 20. " Matthew xi, 19. 

"Luke xv, 2. 



CHRIST THE TEACHER 63 

woman of somewhat more than doubtful 
reputation. Goodness, as we see it in the 
life of Jesus, is not a matter of rules and 
laws, but entirely a matter of character. 

The second thing we learn from Jesus is 
that goodness drives men to action. It is 
motive-power, or it is nothing. There is no 
truly good character that does not somehow 
find an outlet in the doing of good deeds. 
There is no room in Christ's heaven for a 
do-nothing saint. That is the meaning of 
the parable of the talents; the man who 
took his trust-fund and buried it in the 
ground, so that he might be sure not to lose 
it, is cast into outer darkness, because he has 
been idle. 13 "Why call ye Me 'Lord, 
Lord,' " He asked once, "and do not the 
things that I say? Many shall say unto 
Me, 'Lord, Lord,' but I will say unto them, 
Depart from Me, ye that work iniquity.' " 14 
The saints will be known at the Last Judg- 
ment by the way that they have shown 
kindness to the sick and destitute. 15 

13 Matthew xxv, 14-28. 14 Matthew vii, 21-23. 

15 Matthew xxv, 35, 36. 



64 THE WAY 

Christ's own life was one of incessant 
labor. He was driven from place to place, 
from task to task, by a great imperative, a 
"Must" that had its home in His own heart. 
It was a steady pressure from within that 
sent Him unweariedly about His daily occu- 
pations. "I must work the works of Him 
that sent me," 16 was the motto of His life, 
and always He was trying to transplant that 
same imperative into the lives of other men- 
He wanted their goodness, like His own, 
to be a motive-power. In this, as in all else, 
the life of Jesus is the perfect interpretation 
of His law. The good man must do good 
things, not in order to be good, but because 
he is good. If his life fails to show a record 
of good deeds, it is because he himself has 
failed of goodness. But even the deeds 
that look as though they might be good are 
not so, unless they are the fruit of a good 
desire, for there are "prophets who come in 
sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are 
ravening wolves." 17 

As we read these things in our New Testa- 
ments, they are all so plain and simple that 

"John ix, 4. "Matthew vii, 15. 



CHRIST THE TEACHER 65 

we wonder how anyone could think other- 
wise about them than just as Jesus thought; 
and yet there is perhaps no other single 
thing in all Christ's teaching that slips away 
from us so easily as this about the inward- 
ness and the driving-power of goodness. Our 
minds are so taken up with the surface 
things, that our thoughts seldom enter the 
deeper-lying realm of motives, and when 
they do, it is a sort of voyage of discovery, 
where everything is strange. What we think 
of as our goodness is largely habit; our 
judgments of good and evil are mostly 
formed by rule ; we apply the Ten Command- 
ments to conduct, rarely to motive. And so 
it matters not how often we have heard 
Christ's idea of goodness taught, it comes 
to us, each time we meet it, as something 
like a new discovery. It is so different 
from our ordinary notion of goodness that 
we can understand why Jesus said, "The 
last shall be first, and the first last." 18 

But Jesus' teaching goes still farther. He 
was not satisfied with telling men that good- 

18 Matthew xx, 16. 



66 THE WAY 

ness is a quality of soul and a motive that 
drives men to action. For Jesus also showed 
very clearly what goodness really is. It is 
godlikeness, nothing else. He said, "Be ye 
therefore perfect as your Father in heaven 
is perfect." 19 That means two things. It 
means that we are to be good with a good- 
ness that is complete as God's own; it also 
means that we are to be good with a good- 
ness that is like God's own. To know what 
we ought to be, then, we must know what 
God is. When we are what God is, then we 
are good; but not till then, for goodness, 
righteousness, holiness are only names for 
godlikeness. 

Here it is that the two sides of Jesus' 
teaching meet in a perfect harmony of pur- 
pose. We never know anything so long as 
we know it only by itself; we must know 
two things together in order to know either 
of them. We must know ourselves in order 
to know God; we must know God in order 
to know ourselves. Jesus has brought the 
world both kinds of knowledge. He has 
shown us ourselves as we might be, if we 

"Matthew v, 48. 



CHRIST THE TEACHER 67 

were entirely god-like. Human nature, as 
we see it in Him, is human nature at its 
possible best; and we must not forget that 
human nature ought always be at its best. 
He has also shown us God as He would be 
if He were a man; that is to say, He has 
shown us those aspects of God in which we 
can be like Him, that "image of God" in 
which man was created, and that is God's 
character. 20 Finally, He has showed us God 
and man together, because they belong to- 
gether, God in man and man in God. 

Goodness, then, is godlikeness. But what 
does that mean? What is it to be like God? 
When we go with that question to the teach- 
ing and the life of Christ, we get more than 
one answer. For one thing, to be like God 
is to share God's purposes and have them 
for our own. That was what Jesus meant 
when He taught His disciples to pray, "Thy 
will be done." We usually think of that 
petition as an expression of submission, as 
the acceptance of something that cannot be 
otherwise. In reality it is far more than 
that. It ought to be the voice of a great 

20 See Chapter IV. 



68 THE WAY 

desire, which cannot be satisfied until God's 
will is done always and everywhere. That 
is what the prayer meant in Jesus 7 life. 
When He prayed in Gethsemane, u Not as 
I will, but as Thou wilt," 21 He was doing 
something more than accepting the inevit- 
able Cross, for He was steeling His will to 
follow to the end the will of God, which 
had always been His guide. Until we will 
what God wills, there is no goodness in us. 
But then, at once, another question comes. 
What is God's will? How are we to know 
it? That question, too, has more than one 
answer. In the first place, all of us have 
an inborn idea of what God's will must be. 
We call it "inborn" because all of us have 
it, and none of us can trace it back to its 
beginnings. St. Paul calls it "a law written 
in our hearts." 22 There is no man liv- 
ing who has not some notion of the 
will of God, though he may not give it that 
name. Indeed, it is just because we all have 
this moral sense that we can form an idea 
of what God must be. We need no voice 
from heaven to tell us that certain things 

31 Matthew xxvi, 39. M Romans ii, 15. 



CHRIST THE TEACHER 69 

are wrong and other things are right, that 
certain aims are high and other aims are 
low; and it lies in the very nature of things 
that God's aims are the highest aims. 

Then, too, we all believe that God's will 
has been made known through the teaching 
of men in whom God Himself has lived. 
That was the ground of Christ's indictment 
of the Jews of His own day, — they had a 
knowledge of God's will, but they were not 
living by it; they had "Moses and the pro- 
phets," but they would not listen to them; 
they had all the knowledge that they needed 
to make them accept Him and His teach- 
ing, but they wilfully refused to do the very 
thing for which that knowledge had pre- 
pared them. He summed up the whole of 
human duty in two great commandments, 
u Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God — and 
thy neighbor as thyself" 23 ; but both of these 
commmandments w r ere already a part of 
their law, 24 and Jesus' accusation is that they 
do not live by the law they have; they are 
worse than the people of Nineveh, who re- 

23 Mark xii, 30, 31. 24 Deuteronomy vi, 5; Leviticus 
xix, 18. 



70 THE WAY 

pented when Jonah preached to them. 25 St. 
Paul repeats the same indictment. He says 
that there is no reason for a Jew to boast 
about his Scriptures unless He obeys the 
will of God, which he finds written there; 
the heathen have no Scriptures, but they are 
oftimes better than the Jews, who have 
them, because they live by what little 
knowledge of God's will they have. 26 

Finally, we learn God's will from the life 
and teaching of Jesus. Thus no man who 
has had an opportunity to be a Christian 
can excuse his lack of goodness because he 
did not know the will of God. He was 
born with it "written in his heart," he has 
heard it declared by prophets and lawgivers, 
he has had the chance to see it in Jesus 
Christ. Any failure to make God's will our 
own is our own failure, for which no one 
is to blame except ourselves. 

To be like God is to share His purposes 
and make His will our own. And that 
means to be unselfish. For unselfishness is 
a quality of God. Jesus has taught us that 

36 Matthew xii, 41. 29 Romans ii, 13-29. 



CHRIST THE TEACHER n 

God is love, and unselfishness is just another 
name for love. Perhaps it were better to 
say that unselfishness is a name for one 
aspect, or one side, of love. It is love 
looked at from the point of view of self; 
for love, in the highest and the truest sense 
is the giving of self to someone else. Thus 
Jesus gave His whole life to others, and 
His giving was God's giving. In Him 
"God so loved the world that He gave His 
Son." 27 

Christ's view of His own self was that 
it existed not for its own sake, but as a 
sacrifice, as a possible blessing for others, — 
for any others and for all others. God's 
will, therefore, as we learn it from Christ, 
is the will to give Himself, and to be like 
God we, too, must have the will to give, 
the sacrificial will that is without a trace or 
taint of selfishness. 

There is another reason, too, why god- 
likeness must mean unselfishness. When 
we make God's will our own, w r e have to 
limit our desires. Rising unbidden in the 
hearts of all of us are hopes and ambitions 

"John iii, 16. 



72 THE WAY 

and longings that have to do only with self. 
We long for power, for wealth, for praise, 
for pleasure. We want these things not for 
the sake of others or to help us in the doing 
of God's will, but because they satisfy cer- 
tain desires from which none of us is entirely 
free. Thus every man who strives to live 
the sacrificial life of God must pass through 
times of bitter conflict, times when his soul 
is torn between the longing for immediate, 
personal and selfish satisfactions and the 
honest wish to do the will of God. He has 
to repress these selfish natural desires in 
order to say to God sincerely, "Thy will 
be done." The very greatest Christians have 
felt most keenly this conflict between God's 
will and self-will, and it is the very greatest 
of them all who has described it best, — 
"When I would do good," says Paul, "evil 
is present with me. For I delight in the 
law of God after the inward man; but I 
see another law in my members, warring 
against the law of my mind. The good that 
I would, I do not, and the evil that I would 
not, that I do." 28 It was this hard necessity 

38 Romans vii, 15-23. 



CHRIST THE TEACHER 73 

for unselfishness in leading the life of God 
that Jesus had in mind, when He said, "Let 
a man deny himself, and take up his cross, 
and follow Me." 29 

No one can deny the nobility and beauty 
of the character w T hich Jesus lived and 
taught It commands the admiration and 
respect even of those who never try to make 
it real in themselves. But men say it is 
impossible; it makes demands that are 
beyond men's powers ; it makes no allowance 
for human weakness; it permits no com- 
promise between godlikeness and selfishness. 
They say, "We grant that Jesus taught this, 
and thousands of Christian teachers have 
taught it after Him, but even Christians 
must admit that no one else than Jesus has 
ever lived it out, and He, you say, is God." 

The answer to this is simple. It is true 
that no other man will ever live perfectly 
the life that Jesus lived, but that is no 
reason why men should not try. It is only 
by effort that we enlarge our powers; we 
need tasks that are beyond our strength, if 

29 Matthew xvi, 24. 



74 THE WAY 

we wish our strength to grow. If we never 
tried the hard things, each generation of 
men would be weaker than the one before 
it. We must go upward, or we must slip 
back, and Christ points the way to the moun- 
tain-top, which ought to be the goal of our 
desire. 

But that is only a partial answer. The 
complete answer is that godlikeness can 
never be the character of men until they 
have God in their lives. The secret of the 
perfect character of Jesus is the perfect 
union of His human life with the life of 
God. "God was in Christ" explains it; 
nothing else does explain it. And so the 
ultimate lesson about humanity that Jesus 
has to teach is that it must fail in goodness 
utterly, apart from God. The life of God 
must enter our lives, if our lives are to be 
like His. 



CHAPTER VI 

Christ the Saviour 

Jesus is more than the world's Teacher. 
When Christians wish to express the deepest 
feeling that they have for Christ, they call 
Him "Saviour," and from the beginning 
they have used the word "salvation" as a 
name for the greatest blessings which they 
have from Him. The word suggests an 
act of Christ. Something that He has done 
has saved us from some threatening danger, 
broken some chain, relieved some great dis- 
tress of ours. Why should He be called the 
Saviour? What is this salvation that we 
have in Him. 

Three thoughts lie, so to say, behind the 
word salvation, and explain our use of it. 
We are not always conscious of them, but 
they are always there. 

The first of them is the thought of sin. 
Think for a moment about some of the 
75 



76 THE WAY 

things that have been said already. 1 Human 
nature has two sides. All of us can catch the 
vision of the heights, and all of us know that 
it is on the heights that we belong; but all 
of us are conscious, too, of a force that 
draws us down from them when we essay 
to climb. Again, it is Jesus Who has made 
us conscious of the heights. All that He is, 
we ought to be, and are not. He shows us 
that there is something deeply and terribly 
wrong, not only with the world, but with 
and in ourselves. If it is the will of God 
that every man should be like Christ, then 
in every one of us God's will is daily suffer- 
ing defeat. The perfection of Jesus we can 
never share. We cannot make God's will 
perfect in ourselves. 

This, then, is sin. We use the word in 
more than one meaning. It is either failure 
to live the will of God, or it is a condition 
in ourselves which makes the failure inevit- 
able. It is the force that is always drag- 
ging us away from the will of God; it is 
the power that is constantly thwarting our 
desire to make His character our own. It 
1 See Chapters II and V. 



CHRIST THE SAVIOUR 77 

is universal. The man does does not exist 
who is free from it. As we look back over 
our own lives we cannot remember a time 
when it was not with us ; as we consider the 
lives of others, even of little children, we 
see the traces of it there. 

When we come to ask, What is the nature 
of this sin? we find that it is always selfish- 
ness. It is the setting of another will against 
the will of God. Something within us 
always makes us want a character different 
from that of God. God's life is giving, 
our natural impulse always is to take; God's 
life is for us, our lives are naturally for 
ourselves; our lives and God's life belong 
together, in actual fact they are apart. And 
that is sin. 

The second thing that enters into our 
idea of salvation is the notion of responsi- 
bility. We are answerable for what we are. 
If we fail of the great purpose of life, we 
have to bear the penalty of failure. The 
more we know about life's purpose, the 
more complete is the disaster, if that pur- 
pose is not reached. The fact that sin is 



78 THE WAY 

universal among men, the circumstance "that 
all men have sinned and come short of God's 
glory," 2 does not change the ultimate result. 
It only means that larger numbers are in- 
volved in the penalty which falls on those 
who miss the mark. All the truth that Jesus 
has taught, all the insight into the purposes 
of God that we can gain from those men 
into whose hearts He has put His law, all 
the instruction that comes from the inborn 
law, which serves as a standard for the 
common conscience, — all this only goes to 
heighten the contrast between what we are 
and what we ought to be. It merely adds 
to our responsibility. "If I had not come," 
said Jesus, "they would not have had sin; 
but now they have no cloak for their sin." 3 
"That servant which knew his Lord's will," 
He said again, "and did it not, shall be 
beaten with many stripes, and that servant 
which knew not his Lord's will, and did it 
not, shall be beaten with few stripes." 4 We 
cannot escape responsibility by pleading 
ignorance, for our conscience tells us that we 

3 Romans iii, 23. 'John xv, 22. 

4 Luke xii, 47, 48. 



CHRIST THE SAVIOUR 79 

have never lived out the will of God that 
we know. 

The third thought that enters into our 
idea of salvation is the conviction of im- 
mortality. Others than Christians hold that 
belief, and it takes many forms in the minds 
of different men. Christians connect it with 
the resurrection of the body, others think of 
it as merely a continuance of the spiritual 
part of man after the body has been laid 
aside, but it is only a rare and occasional in- 
dividual who really and completely believes 
that the thing which we call death ends 
everything for him who dies. Now be- 
lieving, as we do, in the continuance of life, 
we think of that "world to come" as the 
place where the penalty of sin will be in- 
flicted. The man who would not have God 
here, cannot have Him there ; selfishness will 
have its perfect work; the downward tend- 
encies of human nature will work themselves 
out to utter misery. That is the final 
penalty of sin. 

These three thoughts, therefore form the 



80 THE WAY 

background of our notion of salvation, — sin, 
responsibility and immortality. From sin, 
and from its consequences, Christ has saved 
us. "Thou shalt call His name Jesus (which 
means, 'God is salvation'), for He shall 
save His people from their sins" 5 was the 
message that announced His advent. u God 
gave His Son, that whosoever believeth in 
Him should not perish, but have everlasting 
life" 6 is St. John's summary of the Gospel. 
"Believe and be saved" is the cry with which 
the missionaries of the Cross have been 
going up and down the world for almost 
nineteen hundred years. That is what we 
mean, when we speak of Christ the Saviour. 

And then, at once, the question arises, 
How was this done ? What has made Jesus 
the Saviour of the world? The answering 
of that question leads us into the deepest 
mystery of the Christian faith, it makes us 
think of God as related, somehow, to human 
sin. We cannot answer it without a back- 
ward look upon the life of Christ. 

From the time when His public ministry 
began, it was a life of sorrow. We may 

Matthew i, 21. 'John iii, 16. 



CHRIST THE SAVIOUR 81 

well believe that it was not without its hours 
of joy. "When men shall revile you," He 
said, "and persecute you, then rejoice and 
be exceeding glad" 7 ; and who shall say that 
the heart of Jesus did not know that glad- 
ness? "There is joy in the presence of the 
angels," He said again, "over one sinner that 
repenteth" 8 ; and who shall deny to Him 
that joy? But it was, after all, a joy in the 
things that men count sorrow. We know 
that Jesus wept, but nowhere is it written 
that He laughed. It was a life of self- 
denial. From the time of the Temptation, 
on to the end, He was constantly refusing 
things that He might have had. More than 
once He fled so that He might not be taken 
by force and made a king. And then, at 
last, that blameless, holy life went out in 
bitter pain and deep disgrace, in the long 
torture of the Cross, amid the studied in- 
sults of a jeering crowd. He died a crim- 
inal's death. It is a tragedy, the saddest 
that history knows. 

But all through the life of Jesus, as we 
read it in the Gospels, there runs a single 

f Matthew v, II, 12. 8 Luke xv, 10. 



82 THE WAY 

dominant idea. He is here to do the will 
of God. He is convinced that God's pur- 
pose cannot be reached except through His 
suffering and self-denial. Therefore they, 
too, are included in the Father's will, and 
because they are God's will, He accepts 
them. He makes them His own desire, and 
the conscious purpose of His life focusses 
upon the Cross. "I have a baptism to be 
baptised with," He says, "And how am I 
straitened until it be accomplished." 9 He is 
conscious of an imperative of suffering, as 
well as an imperative of goodness, and He 
accepts them both in obedience to His 
Father's will. "He became obedient, even 
so far as to die; nay, to die the death of 
the Cross." 10 "The cup which My Father 
hath given Me, shall I not drink it?" 11 was 
a question that could have, for Him, only 
one answer. Therefore He sees His Pas- 
sion as a triumph; the shame and the dis- 
grace of it are, for Him, a glory. His life 
?was one of progressive sacrifice, and the 
Cross was its culmination, the finishing of 

9 Luke xii, 50. 10 Philippians ii, 8. 
"John xviii, II. 



CHRIST THE SAVIOUR 83 

His work, the final gift of God's unselfish- 
ness to men. 

From the earliest days, all Christians 
have connected Christ's death with the sal- 
vation of the world. It was sin that caused 
it, — not His sin, for He was sinless; but 
the sin that blinded men to His real great- 
ness and made them refuse to acknowledge 
Him as Lord. u God was in Christ," but the 
world did not see God in Him. It treated 
Him as a criminal and visited on Him the 
punishment that it reserved for the lowest 
and the vilest of mankind. It made Him 
an outcast, "shamefully entreated Him" and 
crucified Him between two thieves. 

Thus God descended to the lowest depths 
of earthly shame and became man's partner 
in the sorrow and the suffering that comes 
of sin, in this disordered world. There is 
no consequence of sin that God, in Jesus, has 
not shared; there is no plane of human ex- 
perience, however remote from the blessed- 
ness and joy that come of goodness, that 
God, in Christ has not stood upon it, by 
man's side. He has taken into His own life 



84 The way 

all the consequences of human selfishness. 
"He that knew no sin was made sin for us." 12 
That is why we can say that in His whole 
life, and especially in His Passion, He was 
enduring the penalty of sin. God became 
subject to His own law; the sinless man 
stood in the place of sinners. He suffered as 
though He had been the guiltiest of men. 
No thunderbolt struck down His false ac- 
cusers; no blast of almighty power withered 
the arms that scourged Him, or the hands 
that nailed Him to the Cross ; there was no 
miracle on Calvary, though the people that 
stood by half-expected one. On the contrary, 
Christ accepted the penalty. The bitter 
hardness of it we can partly measure by the 
u sweat, as it were great drops of blood," 
upon His brow in Gethsemane, and by the 
cry of desolation from the Cross, "My God, 
My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" 13 
But hard though it was, Christ chose it as 
His own. "No man taketh My life from 
Me," was the way He spoke of it, "I lay it 
down of Myself." 14 

12 II Corinthians v, 21. 12 Matthew xxvii, 46. 
14 John x, 18. 



CHRIST THE SAVIOUR 85 

Thus Christ became the Saviour of the 
world; not only by suffering, but by choos- 
ing to suffer. "Atonement," "ransom," "re- 
conciliation," "propitiation," "redemption," 
— these are the words in which the New 
Testament writers seek to express the value 
of that obedience of the Saviour to His 
Father's will, which extended even as far 
as the Cross. They connect with ideas 
common in the thought of Jesus' day, but 
far less common in our own. They need ex- 
planation nowadays to make their meaning 
clear, for they deal with notions of sacrifice 
found in the Jewish law, found also, in some 
measure, in the worship of the heathen 
deities. We do not need to follow these 
terms to their sources in order to understand 
that this descent of God to sorrow, this suf- 
fering by Jesus of the penalty of sin, was 
something done for us. He has done for 
us what we could never have done for our- 
selves. The great sacrifice has been made. 
"While we were yet sinners, Christ died 
for us." 15 

Now what does all this mean? It means, 
15 Romans v, 8. 



86 THE WAY 

for one thing, that sin is not a trifling, but 
an awful, a deadly thing. It is not something 
to be taken for granted because it is so com- 
mon, and therefore made light of and ex- 
cused, but it is something to be loathed and 
abhorred and fought and crushed. It is a 
thing so powerful that when God wished to 
conquer it, the means He had to take was 
the suffering and agony and death of Jesus 
Christ. The Cross is the emblem of victory, 
but of victory that is won in bitter struggle 
and at awful cost. To conquer sin in his 
own life should be the dearest wish of every 
man who has looked upon the Cross of 
Christ, for it is sin that defeats the will of 
God, insults His love, separates men from 
Him, and makes godlikeness impossible. 

It also means that the fear of penalty is 
gone. The thought of God as an angry 
Being, as a stern and exacting Master, scan- 
ning His servants' work with hand upraised 
to strike, — that thought is gone forever from 
the mind of the man who has stood beneath 
the Cross and read the true meaning of 
what happened upon Calvary. In its place 
we have the thought of the loving Father, 



CHRIST THE SAVIOUR 87 

Who is all forgiveness. The world, since 
Christ, is a saved world. Of course not 
every individual in the world escapes, or 
will escape, the penalty of sin. Men are still 
held to answer for what they are and what 
they do. Indeed, the salvation of the world 
by Christ has added a new responsibility to 
those that men had before Christ came. We 
have to answer for the way we treat God's 
love. So there are men in whom sin is 
even now working out its own punishment, 
which will be completed in the life beyond. 
They are the men who are not willing to 
be saved. For them even God can do noth- 
ing. But since Christ lived and died no man 
needs to spend his life in fear of punishment 
to come, for u God was in Christ, reconciling 
the world unto Himself." We can tell that 
to every man that lives, and with it we can 
say, as St. Paul said, "Therefore be ye re- 
conciled to God." 16 

And that takes all the fear out of life. 
There is nothing left to be afraid of, — not 
"tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or 

16 II Corinthians v, 19, 20. 



88 THE WAY 

famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword," 
for u in all these things we are more than 
conquerors, through Him that loved us." 17 
The only thing we need to fear is the sin 
within ourselves, for it may still rise up and 
drive God out, and leave us worse than van- 
quished. It is therefore very humbly, but 
very thankfully and happily, that Christians 
give to Christ the name of Saviour. 

"Romans viii, 35, 37. 



CHAPTER VII 
Faith 

The religion of Jesus Christ is a religion 
of faith. Faith is the first demand that 
Christ makes of those who would be Chris- 
tians, and of those who would be known as 
Christians it is required that they profess 
faith in Christ. 

The name "Christian" is foreign to the 
New Testament. We meet it only three 
times in all the twenty-seven books. 1 St. 
Luke tells us that it was at first a nickname. 
The New Testament speaks of Christians as 
"disciples," or "pupils," of Jesus, but oftener 
it calls them simply "believers." The dif- 
ference between Christians and other people 
is that they "believe" and others do not. 
"Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ" — that is, 
have faith in Him — "and ye shall be saved" 
has been the message of all the Christian 

*Acts xi, 26; xxvi, 28; I Peter iv, 16. 
89 



90 THE WAY 

preachers from St. Peter's day to our own. 

Naturally, the New Testament has much 
to say about faith. "We are justified by 
faith"; 2 "by grace are ye saved through 
faith"; 3 "Christ dwells in your hearts by 
faith/' 4 — these are but a few of the things 
that Paul tells us; and St. John says that 
the reason why he wrote his Gospel was 
"that ye might believe, and believing, might 
have life." 5 If we were to gather together 
all the passages in the New Testament that 
speak of faith, we would easily conclude 
faith is the greatest word in the whole Chris- 
tian vocabulary. A Christian is a man of 
faith; he becomes a Christian when faith 
enters his life; he ceases to be a Christian 
when faith departs. Without faith there is 
no Christianity, no Church, no fellowship of 
man with God, no real brotherhood of man 
with men. 

Now it is just the great words of human 
language which have the most tragic his- 
tory. They are the words which are oftenest 
abused and misused. Only think of the 

3 Romans v, i. 3 Ephesians ii, 5- 4 Ephesians iii, 17. 
5 John xx, 31. 



FAITH 91 

words "love" and "liberty," and the wrongs 
which they have been made to cover and 
excuse. It would be a miracle if the word 
"faith" had not been similarly misused and 
misapplied. This has happened, not once 
or twice, but many times; indeed, it is hap- 
pening all the time. We have reason to 
believe that it was happening even while 
the Apostles were still preaching the first 
message of the Gospel. 

The trouble is that the word "faith" can 
have more than one meaning. When we 
use it, we do not always stop to think just 
which of these meanings we intend, and so 
our thought of faith becomes confused. 
Part of the trouble comes, of course, from 
the fact that we do not speak the language 
of the men who wrote the New Testament. 
In that language, which was Greek, "to be- 
lieve" and "to have faith" are one word; 
so are "belief" and "faith." But the whole 
difficulty does not lie there, as we shall see. 

If some one were to ask you what you 
mean by faith, you would probably tell him 
that it means "belief," and you might point 



92 THE WAY 

out to him that its opposite is "unbelief." 
That would be true only in part; it might 
convey a wholly wrong idea of what faith 
is. For belief may be any one of three 
things, — belief of something, belief about 
something, or belief in something. Those 
three ideas are quite different. Tell a man 
about the government of the United States, 
explain to him how it is organized, how it 
operates, what are its principles. He says, 
"I believe that n , and that is "belief"; he 
believes what he has been told. Or he says, 
"I believe it is a good government"; that, 
too, is "belief" ; he believes something about 
the government. Or he says, "I believe in 
that kind of a government" ; that also is 
"belief", but only this last kind of belief is 
faith. 

Thousands of people are repeating every 
Sunday the words of the Apostles' Creed. 
They say, "I believe in God the Father 
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." 
Many of them mean, "I believe that there 
is an almighty God, Who has made heaven 
and earth"; that is belief, but it is not faith; 
the devils share that belief. People say, "I 



FAITH 93 

believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our 
Lord," and only mean that they believe Jesus 
to be the Son of God; again, that is belief, 
but it is not faith. In the same way, people 
say, "I believe in the Bible," when they 
really mean, "I believe that what the Bible 
says is true" ; once more that is belief, but 
it is not faith. 

Of course, all these different kinds of 
belief have something to do with faith. It 
is not possible for us to believe in God, 
unless we believe that there is a God, or 
to believe in Christ unless we believe that 
He is the Son of God. But when we give 
the name of faith to that kind of believing, 
we are in danger of losing the true meaning 
of faith entirely. Certainly it was not that 
kind of belief that Paul had in mind when 
he says, "Being justified by faith, we have 
peace with God." 6 

To make the confusion even worse, we 
have gradually come to use the word "faith" 
in still another sense. We use it to describe 
the things we hold to be true. We speak 
of the Christian faith and the Jewish faith 

•Romans v, I. 



94 THE WAY 

and the Mohammedan faith; of the Roman 
faith and the Protestant faith, of the faith 
of the Turks and the Hindus and the 
Japanese. All this goes to show how 
much we are in need of some clear and defi- 
nite idea about the true meaning of this 
word "faith." 

We shall best get that idea, if we remem- 
ber that "to have faith" means to believe 
in somebody or something. It means to have 
confidence in someone or something. Faith 
is trust. When a man says, "I have no 
faith in the League of Nations," he means 
that he is not willing to trust the future of 
the world to such an organisation. When 
he says, "I believe in democracy," he means 
that he is sure that the principles of demo- 
cracy will ultimately secure to the world the 
largest measure of justice, happiness and 
civic righteousness. When he says, "I be- 
lieve in my physician," he means that he is 
convinced of his physician's skill and judg- 
ment; he proves his faith by putting his life 
in the physician's hands. 

These are illustrations of what faith is, 
for when the New Testament speaks of 



FAITH 95 

faith, it means just this and nothing else. 
When the leper came to Jesus and said, 
"Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me 
clean, " 7 he was confessing his faith. He 
was sure that Jesus had the power to help 
him, and was willing to leave the cure to 
Him. When the Roman captain said, "Speak 
the word, and my servant shall be healed," 
Jesus said, "Even in Israel I have not found 
such faith." 8 The soldier was so sure of 
Jesus that he asked only His word. When 
the disciples were afraid that their boat was 
going to sink, Jesus called them "men of 
little faith," 9 because they had not been will- 
ing to trust Him. Christ's teaching in the 
Sermon on the Mount may be summed up, 
"God is your Father; then why not treat 
Him as children ought to treat a father, 
and leave your lives in His hands?" That 
is faith. 

It would be good for all of us, if we were 
now and then to repeat the Apostles' Creed, 
changing the words a little, and saying, "I 
put my trust in God the Father Almighty — 

7 Matthew viii, 2. 8 Matthew viii, 8, 10. 

9 Matthew viii, 26. 



96 THE WAY 

and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our 
Lord — and in the Holy Ghost.' ' That 
would not change the real meaning of the 
Creed, but only make it clear. 

It would be still better if we were oftener 
to remember how Christian faith had its 
first beginnings. To a few fishermen on the 
shore of the sea of Galilee there came, one 
day, a stranger, who said to them, "Follow 
Me." They knew but little about Him, but 
what they did know gave them confidence 
enough to go with Him. That was their first 
act of faith in Christ. As they lived with 
Him day by day, saw what He did and 
heard what He said, their confidence grew 
stronger and deeper. He gained an ever 
firmer hold upon their lives. They found 
Him trustworthy, and because they found 
Him so, they trusted Him. The more they 
trusted Him, the better they knew Him ; the 
better they knew Him, the more they trusted 
Him; and so they went from faith to faith. 

At first it was only for a place to sleep 
and for food to eat that they trusted Him, 
but by and by they came to trust Him for 
far greater things than these,— for knowl- 



FAITH 97 

edge of God, for power to do God's will, for 
forgiveness of their sins. When at last He 
was taken from them, and u a cloud received 
Him out of their sight," they were still be- 
lievers in Him, and as believers, as men who 
trusted Christ, they went out everywhere to 
persuade others also to believe in Him, to 
trust Him, even as they trusted Him them- 
selves. 

They told these others the story of His 
life, His death, His Resurrection, and As- 
cension; they told them of the promises that 
He had left them; they told them how they 
themselves had learned to think of Him as 
God. They tried to convince these others 
that He is still to be trusted, that what He 
said is still to be held for truth, that the only 
right way to think of God is the way that He 
has taught. They tried to make these others 
feel that because of what He is, and because 
of what He has done, Christ is the rightful 
Lord of every man's life, and that loyalty 
to Christ is man's first duty. Their one great 
purpose, in all this preaching and teaching, 
was to make those who heard them "be- 
lievers in Jesus Christ," that is, men of 



98 THE WAY 

faith, who have confidence in Him and are 
willing to trust Him and the Father Whom 
He has taught men to know. 

That is Christian faith, — not belief of or 
about anybody, but belief in Jesus Christ, 
confidence in Him, willingness to trust Him. 
And that means the acceptance of His lord- 
ship over our lives. Of course it also means 
confidence in God and trust in Him, and that 
carries with it the duty of obedience and 
loyal service. Unless this trust and confi- 
dence are truly present in a man's life, and 
unless he is ready to prove their presence by 
his loyalty, he has not real right to say, "I 
believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord." Thus it 
is possible to believe everything that the 
Bible says, and yet remain an unbeliever, a 
man without faith. 

With this simple meaning of the word 
"faith" clear in our minds, it is easy to see 
why the New Testament makes so much of 
it. We can understand why it is written 
that "in Nazareth Jesus did not many mighty 
works, because of their unbelief"; the people 
did not trust Him, and He could do nothing 
for them. We can understand why He 



FAITH 99 

wept so sorrowfully over Jerusalem; He had 
wanted to help the people there by teaching 
them to see God as He is, but when He tried 
they were unwilling to listen, they had not 
trusted Him. The presence of Jesus could 
bring no blessing to those who had no faith. 
We can also understand why St. Paul can 
say that u we are justified by faith." 

But that brings us directly to another 
question. This faith, of which we have 
been speaking, what does it do? What is 
its value to the man who has it? The ques- 
tion has many answers, for faith does many 
things, works many changes in the life it 
enters, but all the answers may be summed 
up in a single sentence, — Faith takes what 
Christ gives. A faith that was perfect, if 
there were such a thing as perfect faith, 
would take all that Christ gives ; a faith that 
is imperfect takes in the measure of its per- 
fectness. When a man's faith is weak, he 
takes only a little of all that he might have 
from Christ; as his faith grows stronger he 
gets more and more. Two illustrations will 
make this clear. 



100 THE WAY 

For one thing, faith takes Jesus' teaching. 
In this place we are not concerned with what 
that teaching is. 10 It deals with God, with 
sin, with righteousness, with the nature and 
destiny of men. Much of it cannot be 
proved. It lies outside the limits of experi- 
ence ; it is concerned with truth that we can- 
not discover by ordinary human means. 
Such things we cannot prove. When things 
of this kind are told us, we can do only 
one of two things, — either believe them, tak- 
ing the word of him who tells us, or refuse 
to believe them, because we will not take 
his word. The man of faith, who trusts 
Christ, takes His word for many things and 
confidently waits for the proof to come in 
Christ's ow r n time. 

There are many things in Jesus' teaching 
that do not seem to square with the facts of 
life as we have learned them from experi- 
ence. It is not always easy to believe, for 
example, that God is love. There are times 
when it seems that He is hard and cruel. 
But the man who has learned to trust Christ 
keeps on believing it anyhow, for Christ has 
10 See Chapters IV and V. 



FAITH 101 

taught him this, and he is sure that, sooner 
or later, he will find it so, even in his own 
experience. So, too, it is not always easy to 
believe in a life beyond the grave. The 
brutal fact of death seems to contradict it 
flatly. But the man who puts his trust in 
Christ is not worried by that contradiction, 
and lives on in expectation of a life to come. 
Thus faith gives us balance and ballast and 
stability. 

There is another thing faith does, of 
which St. Paul is riever tired of speaking. It 
takes salvation. Of what salvation is we 
have spoken in another place. 11 It is forgive- 
ness and the power to lead a life of increas- 
ing holiness here in this world; it is perfect- 
ness and happiness hereafter. This salva- 
tion Jesus has offered to all the world. Any 
man may have it, but only because of what 
Christ is and what Christ has done. But 
the only way to receive that salvation is to 
take it from Him in faith, humbling our- 
selves, forgetting ourselves, and opening 
our lives to the entrance of the power of 
God. When we do that we have our sal- 

11 See Chapter VI. 



102 THE WAY 

vation. It is given to us now and here. "By 
grace are ye saved, through faith; and that 
not of yourselves; it is the gift of God" 12 
is the way Paul puts it. When he says that 
we are "justified by faith," he means the 
same thing. Because we have taken, in 
humble trust on Him, the blessing that the 
Saviour offers us, we have no longer any 
reason to be afraid of God or of His 
judgment. 

And there is still another thing faith does 
for us. It opens our lives to be the dwell- 
ing-place of Christ Himself. For Christ 
does live in those who are His humble and 
faithful people. He is not only God above 
us and around us; He is God within us. 
Through the men of faith, the men who 
trust Him and accept Him and obey Him 
as their Lord, He still is working, and 
always will be working, in the world. 
"Christ liveth in me, and the life which I 
live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the 
Son of God," 13 says Paul; and in one of 
the great visions of the Revelation, John 
heard Christ saying, "Behold I stand at the 

12 Ephesians ii, 8. "Galatians ii, 20. 



FAITH 103 

door and knock; if any man hear My voice 
and open the door, I will come in to him." 14 
Thus it is only through faith that we 
become godlike. It is our faith which 
makes it possible for us to be the loyal and 
obedient children of the Heavenly Father, 
the "sons of God," 15 as Paul calls Christian 
men, through whom and in whom the Heav- 
enly Father's will is done "on earth as it is 
in heaven." 

"Revelation iii, 20. "Galatians iv, 6. 



CHAPTER VIII 

The Holy Ghost 

In the Apostles' Creed we all confess, "I 
believe in the Holy Ghost," just as we con- 
fess, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, 
and in Jesus Christ, His Only Son, our 
Lord." From the earliest days Christians 
have been baptising, as Jesus taught them, 
"In the Name of the Father and of the Son 
and of the Holy Ghost." Why should this 
be? Why the three names of God? The 
answer is found partly in some of the things 
that Jesus said, partly in the experience of 
Christians. 

On the night before His crucifixion, 
Jesus was preparing His disciples for the 
separation that was soon to come. 1 He told 
them that when He was gone, He would 
send them "another Comforter"; so, at 
least, our English Bible renders the words 

1 John xiv-xvi. 

104 



THE HOLY GHOST 105 

that Jesus used. But when we go back to the 
language in which the New Testament is 
written, we find that the One Whom He 
promised to send them is called not "Com- 
forter," but "Helper." He told them that 
this Helper would "guide them into all 
truth"; that He would quicken their 
memories of Him, would "bear witness" to 
Him; that He would make them strong to 
carry the burdens that life would lay upon 
them. Jesus called this Helper "the Holy 
Spirit, or Holy Ghost," "the Spirit of 
Truth." As we read what Jesus said about 
the Holy Spirit, His meaning becomes very 
clear. The Spirit will take up His work and 
carry it on to the end of time. It is a 
promise. 

After Christ's Ascension, the disciples 
who had received that promise were con- 
vinced that it had been fulfilled. They found 
themselves in possession of powers which 
they had not had before. Their minds were 
clearer about the meaning of all that they 
had seen in Jesus and heard from Him; 
they had a firmer grip upon the tasks which 
Christ had left for them to perform; they 



106 THE WAY 

were stronger to perform those tasks ; things 
were happening in their lives which they 
could not explain and which they could never 
have brought to pass by themselves. Think- 
ing of these things, they knew that God was 
working in them and using them to do His 
work, and remembering the promise that 
Christ had made, they said, "It is the Holy 
Ghost." 

Their belief in the Holy Spirit was deep- 
ened as the years went by. Before their 
very eyes, God was working miracles. The 
greatest of these miracles was none of the 
things that we commonly call by that name, 
not the healing of the sick and the raising of 
the dead, and the unexplained opening of 
prison-doors. It was the conversion of men 
to Christ. They were poor and, for the most 
part, unlearned men, and Jesus had given 
them a commission which on other lips than 
His would have seemed absurd. He had 
told them to go out and "make disciples of 
all nations. " 2 Because He had told them to 
do it, they went out and preached, and were 

2 Matthew xxviii, 19. 



THE HOLY GHOST 107 

themselves astonished at the results. At first 
it was only to their own people that they 
spoke of Jesus, but by and by Paul came 
and "labored more abundantly than they 
all." Jews and Greeks and Romans, and 
that great mixed population which thronged 
the cities around the Mediterranean Sea, 
heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and by 
the hundreds and the thousands they turned 
away from their old religions, from their 
idols and their superstitions and their im- 
moralities, and became members of the 
Christian churches that sprang up every- 
where. A power was at work that was 
greater than the power of Paul and Barna- 
bas and Silas and Peter and Timothy and 
the other missionaries who were telling the 
world of Christ. Still remembering the 
promise of Jesus to send them u another 
Helper," they said, "It is the Holy Spirit." 
And then, as time went on, they saw un- 
folding in these new converts the same kind 
of powers that they themselves possessed. 
They saw an active, zealous, consecrated life 
growing up in these groups of Christians 
who had been converted through their 



108 THE WAY 

preaching. They saw men who had been 
heathen ready to make all kinds of sacrifices 
and to resist the bitterest persecutions for 
the name of Jesus. They saw them filled 
with missionary zeal; they saw them doing 
the impossible; and once more they said, "It 
is the Holy Spirit; Christ has fulfilled His 
promise; He has sent us another Helper to 
carry His work forward; it is God." 

Perhaps in thinking thus about the way 
men first came to believe in the Holy Ghost, 
we have begun to get some idea of the im- 
portance which the Holy Spirit must have 
for our own lives. The idea will become 
still clearer, if we remember some of the 
things that have been said before. God has 
set us a great task. It is His will that we 
shall be like Him. He has shown us, in 
Jesus, what this likeness is. We cannot plead 
ignorance to excuse our failure; and yet we 
fail, we are not godlike. The reason for the 
failure lies very deep in human nature. Sin 
is embedded there, and that same sin is al- 
ways hindering our advance toward God. 
Even when sin has been forgiven — and we 



THE HOLY GHOST 109 

know that God is ready to forgive — it is 
still there, making us desire the things God 
hates, and forbidding us to love the things 
that God desires. Our growth toward God 
is a continual conflict in which we are meet- 
ing repeated defeats. The thing that God 
demands of us is too hard, far too hard, 
for our strength. 

It is here that this truth about God the 
Holy Ghost finds its place. It tells us that 
we must not give up because God's purpose 
is too high and His will too hard. We have 
a Helper Who carries on the work of Christ, 
doing for us the things that Jesus did for 
His disciples while He walked with them the 
roads of Palestine. His work is done in 
hidden and secret ways, but some of the 
results of it we can clearly see. 

Here, for example, is a man who has be- 
come a believer in Christ. Let us imagine 
him in heathen surroundings, growing up to 
manhood without hearing so much as the 
name of Jesus. One day he has heard some- 
one speaking about this Christ. He has 
been interested, has wanted to know some- 
thing more about this Saviour of the world. 



110 THE WAY 

His conscience has at last been roused; he 
has felt that he needs this Saviour for him- 
self. Little by little he has come to think of 
Jesus as the One Who is entitled, above all 
others, to his trust and loyal service. Faith 
has entered his life; he sees everything dif- 
ferently, — God, his fellow-man, duty, every- 
thing. It is just as though some new life had 
been born within him, with new hopes and 
desires and purposes. It is all so new and 
wonderful, so different from what has been 
before, that he cannot believe that he is him- 
self the author of it. It must be God Him- 
self Who has put this faith into his heart. 
When that man says, "I believe in the Holy 
Ghost," he is speaking of One Who is very 
near and very real to him. 

Now multiply that experience by many 
thousands, and you will have a history of 
Christian faith. Jesus said, "Except a man 
be born again, he cannot see the kingdom 
of God." 3 Everywhere that you find a true 
believer in Jesus Christ, a man of faith, who 
is living a life of trust and loyalty, you will 
find a man who has been "born again." He 

3 John iii, 3. 



THE HOLY GHOST m 

may not, like the man we have been imagin- 
ing, have grown to manhood apart from 
Christ. On the contrary, he may have learned 
to know Christ from his earliest childhood 
and his faith may be older than his first con- 
scious memory, but at some point in his life 
God has entered it and made it a new life. 
It is the work of God the Holy Ghost. We 
call it His work of "regeneration." Every 
Christian who can clearly see his own past 
life, must find signs everywhere to show that 
God the Helper has been working there. 

But that is not all. Even when we have 
been "born again" to the higher and the 
better life that is in Christ, we find that this 
new living is not easy. The path may be 
plain enough, but it is hard to keep the path. 
Obstacles are always rising in the way, and 
scarcely has the first been overcome before 
another looms up before us. That is what 
Jesus meant when He said that the way 
which leads to death is broad and easy and 
the way which leads to life is narrow and 
hard. Even Christ Himself had to pass 
through Gethsemane and over the hill of 
Calvary to glory. 



112 THE WAY 

And worst of all is the conflict which the 
new birth begins within ourselves. One 
moment our faith is strong and firm; we feel 
that nothing can shake our loyalty to Christ 
and our devotion to His purposes, the next 
moment we have forgotten all about Him, 
and are acting as though we had never felt 
the touch of His power upon our lives. 
Natural impulse points one way and duty 
points another; we have to curb our inclina- 
tions and force ourselves to do things that 
we are naturally averse from doing. In 
actual fact this new-born man is not one 
man, but two. There is a power within us 
that would drag us down, and that power 
is a part of us; there is a power within us 
that would raise us up, and that power too, 
is a part of us. The two are fighting; now 
one and now the other has the upper hand; 
and the battle lasts as long as life itself 
endures. The best men are most vividly 
conscious of it; no one ever felt it more bit- 
terly than Paul. The more our hearts are 
set upon the doing of God's will, the more 
keenly do we feel the opposition of this 
rival power. 



THE HOLY GHOST 113 

And here again is work for God the Holy 
Ghost. It is His power that must check the 
downward pull of sin. His work is not over 
when men are "born again/' for the new- 
born life would quickly die, if left to fight 
its own way against evil impulse and sinful 
habit. The new birth is, indeed, only the 
beginning of His work, and the battle that 
goes on within us is only a part of God's 
long fight against the power of sin. There- 
fore when a man perceives that little by little 
the new life is winning over the old, when 
he sees that "love, joy, peace, longsuffering, 
gentleness, goodness, meekness, temperance" 4 
are gradually overcoming "the w r orks of the 
flesh," he knows that God is still working 
for him and in him. Then very humbly and 
very thankfully he confesses, "I believe in 
the Holy Ghost." 

"Walk by the Spirit," said St. Paul, "and 
ye shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh." 5 
The Spirit's work is to "sanctify," to make 
men holy. He is God the Helper, living in 
men and working in them. That is why St. 
Paul could tell the Christians of Corinth that 

4 Galatians v, 22, 23. 5 Galatians v, 16. 



114 THE WAY 

even their bodies were "temples of the Holy 
Ghost." 6 

Father, Son, Holy Spirit, — by these 
three names Christians have learned to think 
of God and speak of God. Yet we believe 
that there is and can be only one God. There- 
fore, because they knew Him as one God 
working in these three ways, Christians of 
long ago made a new word with which to 
say that Father, Son and Spirit are three, 
and yet are One. The word they made, and 
the word that we still use, is "Trinity." No 
one imagines that it tells us all there is of 
God to know. All that it does is just to 
sum up in a word the knowledge that we 
have through Christ. The life of God 
reaches beyond the farthest boundary of 
human imagination. It may be that in an- 
other world there will be many names and 
other names and better names to tell of what 
He is. 

6 1 Corinthians vi, 19. 



CHAPTER IX 

Means of Grace 

When once a man has become a real 
Christian, a true believer in Jesus Christ, 
he is very sure that his faith, like every 
other good thing in his life, has come to 
him from God. When he finds within him- 
self a genuine desire to become godlike, he 
is certain that God has given him that desire. 
If he finds a new power within his life, turn- 
ing it toward God, he is convinced that it 
is God's own power. He believes with St. 
Paul, "By grace are ye saved, through faith; 
and that not of yourselves, it is the gift 
of God." 1 

He wants that grace, too, to come to 
other men. He is eager to have them share 
in this great possession which has become 
his own. Like St. Paul, once more, he "longs 
after them in the mercies of Jesus Christ." 2 
And so, in order that he may be clear about 
1 Ephesians ii, 8. 2 Philippians i, 8. 
115 



116 THE WAY 

the way salvation has come to him, and in 
order that he may be able to bring that same 
salvation to other men, he asks, "How is 
this done? What are the means God uses 
to bring the love and mercy of Jesus Christ 
to the souls of men?" 

The natural place for us to look for an 
answer to those questions would be, of 
course, our own experience. We can go 
back over our own lives and try to learn 
when, where and how God has touched them 
with His power and entered upon and begun 
to change them into likeness to His own. 
Then we can compare our own experience 
with that of other Christians. If we can find 
one single means that God has used to enter 
the lives of many men and give them faith 
and righteousness, we shall have the right 
to say, "That is the way God works." 

To be sure that road to the knowledge 
we are seeking is full of difficulties. The 
longer we follow it, the more we are re- 
minded of Jesus' word, — "The wind 
bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest 
the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence 



MEANS OF GRACE 117 

it cometh or whither it goeth; so is every- 
one that is born of the Spirit." 3 It is hard 
for any one of us to point back to a definite 
moment in his life and say, "That is when 
I became a Christian"; for many good 
Christians it is impossible. It is just as hard 
to pick out certain happenings from among 
the many that have marked our past and 
say, "God did that for me." The leadings 
of our own hearts are the hardest of all 
things for us to understand. The life of 
God has touched the lives of most of us 
from their very earliest beginnings; few of 
us, perhaps, can remember a time when we 
were not, in some sense, Christians; not 
many of us are ever entirely outside the in- 
fluence of the Holy Ghost. And yet there 
are some things in our own experience of 
faith about which we can be very sure* 

One of them is that our faith has come 
to us through the agency of other men. It 
has not been produced by any sudden miracle 
from on high. Even the blinding revelation 
that turned a Saul from his path of perse- 

3 John iii, 8. 



118 THE WAY 

cution and made him the first great mis- 
sionary of the Cross, came to him only after 
he had formed the acquaintance of Chris- 
tians and heard the preaching of the Gospel 
he was trying to destroy. Our faith, too, 
has not been a solitary faith. It has not 
come to us apart from other men. We may 
have been alone when we first became con- 
scious of it, but somewhere along our path 
of life the touch of some Christian life must 
have lain, if only for a moment, upon our 
own. 

We may not be able to say with any cer- 
tainty just who those men are at whose fire 
of faith the flame of our own faith has 
been lighted. In these days, and in Chris- 
tian lands, most of us are Christians because 
our parents have been Christians, and they 
have had much to do with the beginnings of 
our faith. But there are numberless other 
men who may have had a part in it. Now 
it is a pastor, whose preaching has opened 
our eyes more widely upon the great truths 
in which God lives; again, it is a friend, a 
teacher, a wife or a husband, sometimes it 
is a child, who has made God and his good- 



MEANS OF GRACE 119 

ness more real to us, though the revelation 
may have been but for a moment. It is in 
a host of fleeting contacts, in each of which 
we feel for an instant the touch of another 
Christian life, that our Christian faith, and 
with it our Christian life, has grown up. In 
that touch something passed from them to 
us, as power went out of Jesus when the 
woman touched the border of His cloak, 4 
and we know and are certain that that some- 
thing is divine. It is through this constantly 
repeated touch of the lives of other men in 
whom God dwells that God touches our own 
lives. Our first answer to the question, 
"How does God work?" must, therefore, 
be, "He works through men." 

Another thing we find to be always true. 
The men and women whose words and deeds 
have helped us to faith and righteousness 
have been themselves believers in Jesus 
Christ, or have professed to be. It is the 
people who have allowed the world to know 
that they were Christians that have 
Christianised the world. It is written of 

4 Luke viii, 46. 



120 THE WAY 

Peter and John, that when they were arrested 
in Jerusalem, the members of the Jewish 
court which tried them, "took knowledge of 
them that they had been with Jesus. " 5 They 
realized that they were Christians after 
they had seen their conduct and heard them 
speak. The disciples were simply fulfilling 
the Saviour's command, u Ye shall be My 
witnesses." 6 

So it has always been. In the dark days 
when to be a Christian was held to be a 
crime against the Roman State, a Christian 
writer tells us that "the blood of the martyrs 
was the seed of the Church." When heathen 
persecutors saw the genuineness of the faith 
that made men willing to die, but unwilling 
to deny their Lord and Saviour, it started 
many of them on the road to faith. All the 
Christians in the world to-day are Chris- 
tians because others have made it known 
that they were believers in Jesus Christ. 
Through all the centuries of Christian his- 
tory runs a line of witnesses who have testi- 
fied to other men that they believed in God 
the Father, and in Jesus Christ, His Son, 

5 Acts iv, 13. 6 Acts i, 8. 



MEANS OF GRACE m 

and in the Holy Ghost. Through this line 
of witnesses, our faith is linked back across 
the years with the faith of the men who left 
their homes by the Sea of Galilee nineteen 
centuries ago, to be the followers and com- 
panions of the Christ. If that line of wit- 
nesses had ever been broken, there would 
be no Gospel in the world to-day. In lands 
where it was broken, as in Africa and cer- 
tain parts of Asia, there was no Christianity 
for a thousand years. It is through be- 
lievers, who preach and teach and testify, 
that faith is kept upon the earth. If our 
faith were to become the silent and secret 
possession of our own hearts, the line of 
Christians would soon become extinct. u No 
man," said Jesus, "lighteth a candle and 
putteth it under a bushel, but on a candle- 
stick, and it giveth light to all that are in 
the house." 7 

A third thing, also, we find to be true. 
Christians, who testify to Christ, are con- 
vinced that they are proclaiming a truth 
which comes from God Himself. It is not 

7 Matthew v, 15. 



122 THE WAY 

merely opinion or tradition, but has a higher 
source than the minds of men. Men have 
preached it, but they have not invented it 
or discovered it; they have spoken it and 
written it and sung it and lived it, but it 
is not theirs, for it is God's own. God has 
made Himself known, and this truth is His 
revelation. Its power to bring peace into 
troubled lives and comfort into sorrowful 
lives and power into feeble lives is proof 
that it is not of men. They call it the "Word 
of God." Through this word, spoken into 
men's ears or lived out before men's eyes, 
God brings men to believe in Him, and in 
His Son, Jesus Christ. We are "born again 
by the word of God." 8 

And that brings us to the fourth thing 
that we learn. Our faith is connected with 
the Bible. That does not mean that we be- 
come Christians by the actual reading of its 
pages. It is possible that we may have be- 
lieved in God, and in Jesus Christ His Son, 
long before we had learned to read at all. 
It may be, too, that our faith has been nour- 

8 1 Peter i, 23. 



MEANS OF GRACE 123 

ished far more by spoken than by written 
words, by sermons and prayers and hymns 
more than by the reading of the Scriptures. 
And yet the fact remains that the testimony 
of faith, which wins our allegiance for 
Christ, does always go back to the Bible. 
The facts, the truths, the ideas which have 
formed our faith are those which are set 
down in permanent form in the Christian 
Scriptures. When we want to know what 
the Gospel really is, it is there that we look 
for knowledge. When we need to assure 
ourselves that God is really our loving 
Father, Whom we can trust amid all the 
changes of the world, we go back to the 
Bible to learn what the men who wrote it 
learned from Christ. When, at some per- 
plexing moment, we need to know just what 
our duty is or feel the need of strength to 
do the duty that we see, we go back again 
to those old Scriptures, where we find the 
Word of God. We find, too, that the men 
whose testimony to Christ has been most 
fruitful in the making and training of Chris- 
tians have always been those to whom the 
Scriptures have meant the most. 



124 THE WAY 

At every stage in our Christian progress, 
then, our lives are made and moulded by 
the power which comes through the Scrip- 
tures and which we get from them, either 
directly or through other men who found 
it there. Without the Bible there could be 
no Church, no preaching of the Gospel. 
Sixteen hundred years ago, when the Em- 
perors of Rome were making their last tre- 
mendous effort to drive Christianity out of 
the world, they made a law that all the 
Christian Scriptures should be seized and 
burned. They had learned, what Christians 
already knew, that if they could succeed in 
destroying the Bible, they would conquer 
Christianity. The authentic story of the life 
of Jesus and the authentic record of the 
words He spoke would have perished, and 
in its place there would have been only a 
tradition of a wonderful life, which would 
have grown dim with time and become de- 
formed by legend; the testimony of St. Paul 
and St. Peter and St. John would have been 
lost forever; the history of that long lead- 
ing through which God prepared the way 
for Christ would have gone out of human 



MEANS OF GRACE 125 

memory, and over the whole religion of the 
Christians the shadow of unreality would 
have fallen. 

The Bible is the record of the showing- 
forth of God, of a process that began long 
centuries before Christ came, and reached 
its full completion in Him. It is the original 
testimony to Christ. Therefore we, who are 
Christians, esteem it differently from all 
other books. To us it seems to come from 
God; we can explain it in no other way. In 
it we seem to hear God speaking, speaking 
of Himself, of men, of righteousness, of sin, 
of love, of faith, of hope. We call it "God's 
Word." And yet, we know that it is also 
man's word, written by men no different 
from ourselves. And so, in order that we 
may give some name to the power which 
made it possible for men to write the Word 
of God, we say that these men were "in- 
spired." 

We began this chapter with the question, 
"What means does God use to bring His 
love and mercy in Jesus Christ home to the 
souls of men?" Now we can answer it. The 



126 THE WAY 

means God uses is His Word, written in 
the Scriptures, drawn from the Scriptures 
into the lives of men, and preached and lived 
by them. That is what we mean when we 
call the Word of God "the means of grace." 

But for many centuries Christians have 
been speaking of other means of grace be- 
sides the Word. The name has been given 
especially to two solemn acts which have 
been practiced since the earliest days. Both 
have been commanded by Jesus. He told 
His disciples to go into all the world and 
make disciples, "baptising them in the name 
of the Father and of the Son and of the 
Holy Ghost." 9 He also told them to repeat 
the act which He Himself performed "in 
the night in which He was betrayed," when 
"He took bread and gave it to them saying, 
'This is My body which is broken for you,' " 
and afterwards gave them the cup of wine, 
saying, "This cup is the New Testament in 
My blood, which is shed for you and for 
many for the remission of sins." 10 Ever 

9 Matthew xxviii, 19. 

10 1 Corinthians xi, 23-25; Matthew xxvi, 26-28. 



MEANS OF GRACE 127 

since that time Christians have been baptis- 
ing and administering the Holy Supper be- 
cause they have the command of Christ. 
These two acts are known as "sacraments" 
and all Christians are agreed that in them 
they obtain some special spiritual blessing. 
For this reason they are numbered among 
the "means of grace." 

We can give them that name because they 
are connected with the Word of God. They 
are the preaching of the Gospel in its purest 
and simplest form. They bring us the very 
heart and center of the Gospel message. 
Christ wanted men to put their trust com- 
pletely in Him and in the Heavenly Father, 
Who is one with Him, and so He gave His 
Christians these two signs of God's eternal 
love. They stand for all that Christ has 
done, for all that God can ever do, for men ; 
they promise all the blessings that He can 
bestow. There is our baptism! It gathers 
all the possible blessings of the Gospel, puts 
them into the single word "salvation," and 
says to each person who is baptised, "All 
this belongs to you"; for Christ has said, 
"He that believeth and is baptised shall be 



128 THE WAY 

saved. " And even though the day when we 
received that baptism may be far behind us, 
and even though we did not know on that 
day all that baptism really means, we can 
still look back to it and be very certain that 
the blessings of the Gospel have really been 
given to us. There is the Holy Supper! It 
offers to those who eat and drink of it every 
good thing that can come to them from the 
Christ Who died upon the cross and rose 
again. It says to them, U A11 this is yours, 
Christ's life and death belong to you, as 
surely as you eat this bread and drink this 
cup." For Jesus said, u My body is broken 
for you ; My blood is shed for the remission 
of your sins." 

Thus these sacraments bring us the Word 
of God, and with it, the joy and peace and 
pardon it confers. They are a promise 
sealed with solemn, sacred acts which Christ 
Himself commanded. They give us an assur- 
ance on which our faith can rest, and through 
which our confidence in the Heavenly 
Father's love and mercy can daily grow 
more firm and strong. 

The sacraments have always had so large 



MEANS OF GRACE 129 

a place in the thought of Christians that 
their ideas of them have gone very far apart. 
The Roman Church counts seven sacra- 
ments instead of two, and holds a view of 
them that differs widely from that which 
has been stated here. Protestants, too, 
have disagreed about them. They have 
not agreed about the meaning of the 
Saviour's words, "This is My body; this is 
My blood." The truest explanation of 
them is that with the bread and wine the 
Christ Who died upon the Cross is really 
present. His body and His blood are the 
sign He gives us that the blessings of His 
life and death are ours. The early Christians 
thought of the Holy Supper as a sign of fel- 
lowship with one another and with Christ. 
They thought of it also as a sign of hope, 
pointing to the Judgment Day, and the per- 
fect fellowship that will be ours in another 
life than this. They called it "Eucharist," u the 
feast of thanksgiving" for all the blessings 
that men have in Christ. So, too, with Bap- 
tism! St. Paul calls it a "washing of new 
birth," meaning that in it there is a real 
power, a real planting of faith and right- 



130 THE WAY 

eousness. We speak of it as a "covenant," 
a solemn pledge by which God gives Him- 
self to us and we give ourselves to God. 

In thinking of the sacraments, it is now 
one and now another of these things that 
is uppermost in our minds. But what con- 
cerns us here is the thought that they are 
"means of grace." They do nothing that 
the Word of God cannot do without them, 
but they are a peculiarly sacred and solemn 
way of bringing us the blessings of the 
Word, and they are a way that Christ has 
Himself appointed. 

One thing more must be said before we 
leave this subject. The Word of God and 
the Sacraments are God's way of bringing 
the Gospel and the power of Christ to us. 
But it is quite possible for Christ to come to 
us without doing us any good. There is no 
magic in Word or Sacrament. The mere 
fact that we have read the Bible and listened 
to sermons and seen and lived with Chris- 
tian people does not necessarily make us any 
different from other men, nor does the mere 
circumstance that we have been baptised and 



MEANS OF GRACE m 

received the Holy Supper. It is only Chris- 
tians, that is, believers, who get the benefits 
and the blessings which the Gospel brings. 
The Gospel gives us a God to trust in; it 
lays foundations for men's faith; but unless 
the house of faith is built, the foundation 
is in vain; unless we accept the blessings and 
the power of the Gospel, we remain just 
what we were before the Gospel came to 
us. And yet when we, as Christians, look 
back upon our lives, we know that our 
Christian faith is not of our own creation; 
it is God that has given it to us, and the 
means that He has used has been the Word 
and the Sacraments. 

If our thought about the "means of 
grace" is true, if this is the way God actually 
works to give men faith and raise and purify 
their lives and make them like Himself, then 
we must think of God as all about us, touch- 
ing our lives continually with His Word 
upon the lips and in the lives of other men. 
We must think of the Holy Spirit seeking 
all the time to enter us through Word and 
Sacrament, striving to direct our purposes 
away from self and toward the perfectness 



132 THE WAY 

of Jesus Christ. Then we can appreciate 
the meaning of that word of St. Paul, with 
which this chapter was begun, "By grace are 
ye saved, through faith, and that not of your- 
selves; it is the gift of God." 11 

n Ephesians ii, 8. 



CHAPTER X 

The Christian's Life 

A man who is truly a Christian cannot 
live like one who is not. That should be 
obvious. The New Testament dwells on it 
often. "Why call ye Me, 'Lord, Lord/ " 
said Jesus, "and do not the things that I 
say?" 1 u By their fruits ye shall know them" 
is a rule of Christ's which St. Paul applied 
to all men. 2 "What ye were" and "what ye 
are" 3 is a contrast that he was always ask- 
ing those first Christians to whom he wrote 
to make. He is never tired of reminding 
them that they are "a new creature in 
Christ." 4 If the religion of Jesus Christ is 
really what we have been trying to say that 
it is, then there is every reason why those 
who profess it should be different from other 
men. 

1 Luke vi, 46. a Matthew vii, 16 ; cf. Galatians, 5 : 22ff., 
Ephesians v, 9. 3 e. g. I Corinthians vi, 9-1 1. *II 
Corinthians v, 17; Galatians vi, 15. 

133 



134 THE WAY 

And yet, when we look around us we are 
likely to find that there is little visible dif- 
ference between the lives of Christians and 
of other men. In the early days of the 
Church Christian writers could point trium- 
phantly to the lives of Christians as the best 
proof that Christianity is divine; in the 
Twentieth Century we have to explain why 
Christianity is divine in spite of the little 
difference that men can observe between the 
life of so-called Christians and the common 
life of the world. 

There are two reasons for this change. 
For one thing, the world is far more Chris- 
tian than it knows or thinks. We can say 
this even while we are still haunted by the 
memories of a bloody war and in a time when 
deep shadows are hanging over the world's 
future. Ideas that have their roots in Chris- 
tian thought have made their way into the 
common thinking of the world. Sins of lust 
are still terribly prevalent; in certain circles 
they are brutally paraded and boasted of; 
but in the days of Jesus they were practiced 
in the temples of cultured Greece as works 



A CHRISTIAN'S LIFE 135 

of service and worship to the gods. Drunken- 
ness was once respectable ; our own land has 
lately made the sale of intoxicants a crime. 
Wars of conquest were once a nation's glory; 
to-day they are a nation's shame. There is 
still enough, and far more than enough, of 
sin and w r rong and evil in public and in pri- 
vate life, but the fact is that the standards 
by which men and groups of men now judge 
themselves and one another are nearer to 
those of the New Testament than ever they 
have been before. The influence of Jesus 
has spread, and still is spreading, round the 
world. 

The second reason why things seem to 
have changed is that a larger number of 
professing Christians are Christians in little 
more than name. There have always been 
such people. Christ had a Judas among the 
Twelve and in St. Paul's little church at 
Corinth there were immoral men. 6 But 
when to be known as a Christian meant to 
incur enmity and suspicion, and sometimes 
bloody persecution, no one would admit that 
he was a Christian unless he was mightily 
6 II Corinthians v. 



136 THE WAY 

in earnest about it. On the other hand, in 
days like our own, when it is rather expected 
that a man shall profess to be a Christian, 
it is not surprising to find many people mak- 
ing that profession when they are not in 
earnest about it at all. It stands to reason 
that in the year 1922 the average church- 
member in Korea will be more serious in 
his convictions than the average church- 
member in New York. 

In Christian lands, then, there is in these 
days a sort of spiritual "No-Man's-Land." 
It belongs almost equally to those who have 
made profession of Christian faith, but are 
insincere or half-hearted about it, and to 
those who have never made any such pro- 
fession, but whose lives have been really 
touched by the Holy Spirit, though, perhaps, 
without their knowing it. The lives of these 
two kinds of people show little or no out- 
ward difference that we can detect. 

Of course, it is easy to make too much of 
this outward likeness. God deals with char- 
acter and motive before He deals with con- 
duct. Jesus tells us that we must make the 
tree good, before we try to make its fruit 



A CHRISTIAN'S LIFE 137 

good. 7 Many men are really better than 
they seem; many are worse than they seem. 
That is why St. Paul warns us, "Judge 
nothing before the time, before the Lord 
come, Who will both bring to light the hid- 
den things of darkness and make manifest 
the counsels of the hearts. " 8 The impor- 
tant thing is that in the life of a Christian 
there are forces at work which do continu- 
ally change his life from within. In some 
measure and to some degree such a man 
does live the life of Christ, and insofar his 
life is "hid with Christ in God." 9 

If we ask what sort of life this is, the 
answer must be given in the life of Jesus. 
He is not only the Saviour of men, but the 
type and model of all the men who are 
saved. As His life was twenty centuries ago, 
so ought our lives to be to-day. In other 
lands than those He knew, amid customs 
and institutions quite unlike those of His 
day, our lives must still bear "the marks of 
the Lord Jesus." 



7 Matthew xii, ^3- 8 1 Corinthians iv, 5. * Colos- 
sians iii, 9. 



138 THE WAY 

That means for one thing, that a Chris- 
tian's life must be a life of faith. A Chris- 
tian ought to trust God as Jesus trusted 
Him. As carefree as the flowers of the 
field, as untroubled as the birds that fly, so 
Jesus said a man's life ought to be, and so 
His life was. It must be in God's hands. 
The hardships that the future holds, the 
sorrows that to-morrow may bring, ought 
not to disturb in any way the Christian's 
quietness of mind. These things are God's 
concern. A Christian ought not to be 
troubled by what men think of him nor wor- 
ried at all about the consequences of the 
things he does. The one great question of 
every moment ought to be the question of 
St. Paul, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me 
to do?" 10 

And that brings us to the second mark 
of the Christian life. It is a life of loyalty. 
The word is common enough among us, but 
the thing that the word stands for is not 
often seen. We talk of loyalty to a govern- 
ment, to principle, to truth; but those are 
10 Acts ix, 6. 



A CHRISTIAN'S LIFE 139 

figures of speech. True loyalty is devotion 
to a person. It is the same quality that a 
soldier shows when he follows his officer 
into a position where he expects to lose his 
life. It is the quality of personal devotion 
which only the rarest individuals are able 
to call out. A Christian's loyalty is given 
to God and Christ. God is his God, Whom 
he has learned through Christ to know and 
trust and love. What he does is done for 
Christ's sake and for His sake Whom he 
has learned to call his Father in heaven. 
God is his God and he is God's servant. 
Therefore it is for God to command and for 
him to obey. He seeks and desires to do 
God's will. When he is sure what God's 
will is, he has no choice but just to do it. 
That was the kind of obedience that Jesus 
paid to His Father. It goes far beyond the 
Ten Commandments; they are only a guide 
to knowledge of God's will. 

Because of this, it follows that a Chris- 
tian's life will be a life of prayer. For in a 
life of faith prayer is a necessary, an inevit- 
able thing. The hour of prayer is the hour 



140 THE WAY 

when we speak to God, when we allow our- 
selves to be conscious of that unseen 
Presence Who is always with us. We 
know in these moments that God is by 
us and within us, and these are the 
times when we gather strength from Him, 
vision to see and power to do His will. That 
was the place that prayer had in the life of 
Jesus. The forty days in the wilderness 
prepared Him for His mission; the prayer 
on the mountain of Transfiguration heart- 
ened Him for the journey up to Jerusalem; 
the night in Gethsemane strengthened Him 
for the Cross. 

When we speak of prayer, the thing that 
we have most commonly in mind is the 
offering of petitions for the things we need 
and want. Jesus told His disciples that they 
should offer such petitions and gave them 
the model of a perfect prayer for Christian 
men to pray. "In everything let your re- 
quests be made known unto God," 11 was 
Paul's direction. But we must not forget 
that there is a kind of prayer in which no 
words are spoken, a silent, humble outgoing 

11 Philippians iv, 6. 



A CHRISTIAN'S LIFE 141 

of a believer's heart to the God in Whom 
he trusts. In a moment of great joy we 
open our lives, as it were, and let God in 
to be the witness and the partner of that 
joy; in a time of deep sorrow and distress, 
we open them again to let Him be partaker 
and supporter of the burdens we are bear- 
ing. The truer our faith and the deeper 
our desire to do God's will, the more we feel 
our need for those moments of approach to 
Him, and the more completely we depend 
upon the power gathered in those moments 
to carry us along the path of daily duty. 

Still another thing that marks the Chris- 
tian life is its dependence on the Word of 
God. To do God's will we must know God's 
will, and there is nowhere else to learn it 
than the Scriptures. The thought of God, 
as it has been spoken by prophets and 
apostles, must be the continual companion 
of our own thought; even Jesus learned 
from the Scriptures what He had to do. But 
more than that, it is the Scriptures that must 
provide the real ground for Christian faith. 
It is only there that we can learn why we 



142 THE WAY 

have the right to call God our Heavenly 
Father, and to trust in Him; it is only there 
that we find the Christ, Who is our Saviour. 
Every great Christian, since first there were 
Christians in the world, has found God in 
His Word. 

But the quality that really makes the 
Christian's life is love. The supreme lesson 
about God that Jesus has taught us is that 
He is love; the supreme ambition that He 
kindles in the hearts of men is to be God- 
like. Therefore He could sum up the whole 
of Christian duty in the two commandments, 
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God — and 
thy neighbor as thyself." 12 

The whole history of the progress of men 
and nations toward the purposes of God 
could be written around that one little word. 
"God so loved the world that He gave His 
Only-begotten Son," 13 is the way St. John 
summed up the meaning of the Gospel. "We 
love Him because He first loved us" 14 is the 
way that he describes the effect of the Gospel 

"Luke x, 2J. "John iii, 16. 

"I John iv, 19. 



A CHRISTIAN'S LIFE 143 

on those who receive it. "Love is the ful- 
filling of the law" 15 ; "He that dwelleth in 
love dwelleth in God, and God in him"; 
"This commandment have we from Him, 
that he who loves God, love his brother 
also." 16 These are but a few of the words 
in which the New Testament speaks of that 
love which makes the real inwardness of 
Christian living. Around this little word, 
"love," many ideas have gathered which 
tend to obscure its real meaning. We use 
it in senses that cannot apply to Christian 
love at all; we abuse it to purposes that are 
vile and fleshly. Commonly we think of it 
as sentiment or feeling, with a suggestion of 
weakness and softness. But love, in the 
Christian sense, is a robust and manly thing. 
It is motive, it is driving-power, it is the 
force that lies behind the most vigorous 
action. The will of God directs us, it sets 
our purposes and marks out the channels for 
our action; it is the force of love that car- 
ries us along God's ways to His goals. We 
do the will of God, not because we must, 
or because we are afraid not to do it, but 

15 Romans xiii, 10. 16 1 John iv, 16. 



144 THE WAY 

because the will of God is the one thing we 
wish to do; and we wish to do God's will 
because we have learned to love Him. 

The root of it lies, perhaps, in gratitude. 
If we really believe that everything we have 
which is worth having comes to us from 
God, then we are ungrateful unless we wish 
to do His will. If we are convinced that 
He is indeed the Heavenly Father of Whom 
Jesus spoke, Who is interested in us for our 
own sakes and Who gives because it is in 
His nature to be always giving, then our 
love for Him should waken as simply and 
inevitably as the ripe apple falls from the 
tree or the tides rise to the moon. This love 
that we give back to the God Who loves us 
is the strongest and purest motive that life 
can have. It is pure unselfishness, the one 
great quality in which a man can approach 
most nearly to the character of God. It lies 
beneath every truly Christian act that a man 
can perform, and oft times it is present 
when the power for action is denied. It 
makes the real difference between the man 
who is and the man who is not a Christian. 
Two men may do the same thing, perform 



A CHRISTIAN'S LIFE 145 

the same act. To the observer, who sees 
the act but knows nothing of the motive, 
there would seem to be no difference; but 
the one act may be prompted by utter sel- 
fishness, the other by the love of God. Be- 
tween the quality of those two acts we can- 
not judge, but in His sight to Whom motives 
are as plain as deeds, the difference is that 
of day and night. 

And that leads directly to another 
mark of the Christian's life. It is a 
life of sacrifice. For sacrifice is the 
only measure that can be applied to love. If 
you would know how deep and true a man's 
love is, test it by asking what it would give 
away; not what of money or other material 
thing, but what of himself. How great is 
the sacrifice that he will make for the person 
or the thing he loves? Answer that ques- 
tion, and then learn what is the object of 
his love, and you know the man. 

The love of Jesus was made perfect in 
sacrifice, — in self-denial, in poverty, in the 
Passion and the Cross; and He has said, 
"If any man will be My disciple, let him 



146 THE WAY 

deny himself and take up his cross and fol- 
low Me." 17 Just as His life was one of sacri- 
fice, so the element of sacrifice must enter 
into the life of every man who would be a 
follower of His. We must give what we 
would like to keep, and give it freely, if 
we would really be counted among those in 
whom the life of Christ is growing up. 

That does not mean that we must simply 
throw away the precious things that God 
has given us. There is a self-denial that is 
not sacrifice, there is a voluntary suffering 
that is sheer waste. There was a time when 
men left home and friends and family and 
turned their backs upon the world to become 
dwellers in the deserts, thinking that by this 
kind of self-denial they could win God's 
favor. That was not Jesus' way. He wasted 
nothing, not a day, not an hour of those few 
precious years of labor. Men's need was 
calling all the time for that which only He 
could give, and so He gave until He had 
given all. That is the Christian's sacrifice, 
the spirit that will hold nothing back, but 
spends, when need requires, till there is 
17 1 John iv, 21. 



A CHRISTIAN'S LIFE 147 

nothing left to spend. It was of this kind 
of sacrifice that Christ must have been think- 
ing when He said, u He that findeth his life 
shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for 
My sake shall find it." 18 When selfishness 
wins we lose ; when selfishness loses, we win. 

Therefore a Christian's life is sure to be a 
life of struggle. It is natural for men to want 
to take and keep the things they like. That 
impulse is born with us; it stays with us 
till we die. In the desire to get the most 
for self and make the most of self lies the 
real root of all the sin and misery of which 
the world continues to be full. Against that 
deeply intrenched desire the Christ-life has 
to struggle for expression. That makes our 
inner selves a battle-ground where the evil, 
which is selfishness, and the good, which is 
love, are contending for the mastery. The 
never-ending fight of good with evil, of God 
with Satan, is fought within the hearts and 
wills of men. It is a battle of unseen powers. 
The conflicts that we see are but the signs 
of it. The one great sin of selfishness takes 
18 Matthew x, 39. 



148 THE WAY 

many forms and finds its way out to the 
light through the thousand opportunities 
that we call temptations; the one great 
virtue of love makes but slow headway in 
the effort to rule our lives. And so the fight 
goes on year after year, God trying to raise 
us up and make us pure and strong and like 
Himself, sin dragging us down and keeping 
us weak and unclean with selfish desires. 

Yet through all this struggle, the Chris- 
tian's life is a life of joy. There is a power 
in Christian faith that makes us always 
glad even amid sorrow; there is a sweeten- 
ing of life through love that gives us pleasure 
even in sacrifice. There is a happiness in 
service that selfishness can never bring, and 
there is a never-failing spring of gladness 
in the consciousness that God is with us. 
Even in the times of hardest struggle, we 
have the certainty that in the end the vic- 
tory will lie with God and not with sin, that 
the time is coming when temptation will 
have no more power upon our lives, and 
"God will be all in all." 19 

19 1 Corinthians xv, 28. 



CHAPTER XI 

The Kingdom of God 

No Christian lives alone. His faith in 
Christ draws him into fellowship with other 
men, with all the men and women every- 
where who share that faith, and the lives 
of all of them together are united with the 
life of Jesus Christ. They live in the King- 
dom of God. 

Jesus was always talking about that king- 
dom. In our New Testament He seems to 
call it sometimes the Kingdom of God, 
sometimes the Kingdom of Heaven, but it 
is likely that in the language that He spoke 
it was the same word that He always used. 
He spoke of it so constantly that we must 
believe He thought it the most important of 
all the things He had to tell the world about. 
He had a habit of beginning His parables 
with the words, "The kingdom is like" this 
or that; He told the Jews that His miracles 
149 



150 THE WAY 

were a proof that "the Kingdom of God had 
come upon them"; 1 He told His disciples 
that it was their special privilege to "know 
the mysteries of the kindom" ; 2 He taught 
them to pray, "Thy kingdom come"; 3 when 
He stood before Pilate He claimed to be a 
king, but said, "My kingdom is not of this 
world." 4 Let us try, then, to get some clear 
idea of what Jesus meant when He spoke 
about the Kingdom of God. 

The very first thing that Jesus teaches 
us about the kingdom of God is that there 
is such a thing. It is a kingdom that is here 
on earth now. It is not the same thing as 
"heaven," — a State that is to be founded 
after this world has passed away. It has 
been founded already. Jesus said, "It is 
within you." 5 To be sure, it is not perfect 
or complete. It has to grow up to complete- 
ness in this world of sinning, struggling men. 
The grain of mustard-seed has to root and 
sprout and become the tree; 6 the wheat has 
to ripen to the harvest 7 ; the yeast has to 

1 Luke xi, 20. 2 Mark iv, II. "Matthew vi, 10. 
4 John xviii, 36. 5 Or, "among you," Luke xvii, 21. 
•Matthew xiii, 31. 7 Matthew xiii, 24//. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD 151 

work slowly through the mass of flour. 8 But 
the kingdom is here, and when we pray u Thy 
kingdom come/' we are praying not only 
that the Lord may "descend from heaven 
with a shout," but rather that He will com- 
plete a work that He has already begun. 
The kingdom has been here ever since Jesus 
came. 

Then, too, Jesus teaches us that God's 
kingdom is also His own kingdom. His 
people were looking for a king. Prophets 
had foretold His coming; poets had sung 
the glories of His future reign. There was 
a name all ready for him when he should 
appear, — the name "Messiah," or "An- 
nointed," which the Greeks translated into 
"Christ." Jesus accepted the honors paid 
Him by those who believed that He was 
this promised king; he allowed the name of 
Christ to be given to Himself; He died be- 
cause He would not say that the people who 
gave Him that name and hailed Him as 
their king were wrong; and on His head, 
in mockery, the Romans pressed a crown 
•Matthew xiii, 2>2>ff. 



152 THE WAY 

of thorns and on His Cross they hung the 
title, "This is the king of the Jews." 9 To 
get Jesus' idea of God's kingdom, we must, 
therefore, read the life of Jesus, and not 
His words alone. 

And that suggests at once another truth 
about God's kingdom. It is a kingdom in 
which the king is a servant. His title to the 
crown rests on the service He has rendered. 
That is its great contrast with the kingdoms 
of the world. All the kingdoms that men 
knew when Jesus lived, and for centuries 
afterwards, were founded in force, in the 
power which compels men to obey laws which 
they have not made and against which they 
may be in continual inward rebellion. The 
kings of those earlier days were rulers, 
lords, masters; the subjects of the kings 
were those who served them. No wonder 
Pilate mocked the Saviour with a crown of 
thorns ! He could not understand. Jesus 
had said, "If My kingdom were of this 
world, then would my servants fight," 10 and 
a king whose servants would not fight for 

9 John xix, 19. 10 John xviii, 36. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD 153 

him was, in the Roman's eyes, no king at all. 

The power that Jesus used to conquer the 
hearts of men and bring them under the rule 
of God was the power of righteousness and 
love. The works of mercy day by day, the 
healing of the sick, the feeding of the hun- 
gry, the roadside parable, the sermon on the 
hillside or from the boat, — these were the 
king's works. 11 The greatest of all His 
conquering battles was His willing death 
upon the Cross. Even to us, whose allegiance 
He has won through the service He has 
rendered, it seems a strange kind of royalty. 
But royalty it is, a kingship founded in 
service. 

Of course that does not mean that the 
kingdom of God is without a king. It is not 
a democracy, in which the will of the 
majority is the law for everybody, but a 
kingdom, in which there is just one, all- 
controlling will, — the will of God. To be 
in that kingdom, I must loyally accept the 
will of God and make it, so far as I can, 
my own. The king is, indeed, everyone's 
servant, but His subjects must be willing to 
11 Cf. Matthew xi, 1-5. 



154 THE WAY 

be served. To live in God's kingdom, I 
must let Him serve me in His own way, and 
I must serve Him, also in His own way. 
That is what Jesus meant by saying, u Not 
everyone that sayeth unto Me, 'Lord, Lord/ 
shall enter the kingdom, but he that doeth 
the will of My Father." 12 It is because He 
knew how hard this is, that He said, "Ex- 
cept ye be changed, and become as little 
children, ye shall not enter the kingdom." 13 
It was for that reason that He told Nicode- 
mus, "Except a man be born again, he cannot 
see the kingdom of God." 14 But when a man 
accepts the service that God renders Him, 
he does enter that kingdom, and become one 
of the great multitude who have done the 
same thing, and who are trying by the king's 
help, to live by the king's will, which is the 
kingdom's law. 

And that leads us right on to another 
truth about God's kingdom. The king's 
subjects form a society. They are not just 
so many hundreds, or so many thousands, 

12 Matthew vii, 21. "Matthew xviii, 3. 
"John iii, 3. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD 155 

of separate men and women, each living his 
own life alone and trying, in isolation, to 
guide his actions by the will of God; nor are 
they a crowd, all massed together and mov- 
ing as the will of God directs. But they form 
a kingdom. There is law in it, and order. 
The lives of its subjects touch upon other 
lives and have relations of all kinds with 
these other lives, and the nature of these 
relations is determined by the will of God. 
We talk of mercy and justice and love as 
qualities of God; but God could not be just 
and merciful and loving unless there were 
someone to whom He could be just and mer- 
ciful and loving. We speak of these same 
qualities as things which ought to be in every 
Christian's life, but they could not be there 
unless there were other people for Chris- 
tians to live with. The purpose of Jesus was 
to bring men close to God; but it was a part 
of His purpose to bring men close to one 
another also. His thought is always look- 
ing forward to a time when the kingdom 
shall be perfect and its subjects will be re- 
moved from all contact with "those that are 
without." But that time has not yet come. 



156 THE WAY 

For the present, the world is like the field 
in which the wheat and the weeds are grow- 
ing side by side, 15 and the wheat must not 
become weeds. The king's subjects are liv- 
ing every day with those who are not his 
subjects, but even in their dealings with these 
others, they are bound to live by the king- 
dom's law. 

What, then, is that law? Reduced to its 
lowest terms, it is the commandment, "Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with all heart 
and with all thy soul and with all thy mind 
and with all thy strength, and thy neighbor 
as thyself." 16 But that statement is to brief 
for us to get its meaning fully. To complete 
it, we need to go to the Sermon on the 
Mount. 17 There the law of the kingdom is 
stated so plainly that no one can misunder- 
stand it. The Sermon covers only three 
pages of our New Testaments, but it des- 
cribes a perfect society of perfect men. It 
pictures a State in which every member sets 
an example to every other, letting "his light 
shine before men, that they may see his 

15 Matthew xiii, 24-30, 38. lfl Mark xii, 30, 31. 
17 Matthew v-vii. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD 157 

good works. " There is no murder and no 
war, because the first movement of hatred 
against another man is forbidden; even the 
angry word has no place in this society. 
There are no sins of the flesh, because sin- 
ful desire is ruled out of this kingdom, and 
its subjects would rather pluck out their 
eyes and cut off their hands than let these 
members lead them into wrong-doing. There 
is no deception in this perfect State, and no 
hypocrisy; no one wants to be known as any 
better than his fellows, nor does anyone set 
himself to judge another, but every man is 
his own severest judge. There is no private 
property, for no one feels the need of it; 
men are not aiming to lay up for themselves 
the treasures of this world, but the better 
treasures of righteousness; and because 
there is no selfish grasping after wealth, 
there is no poverty. There is no worry and 
no care, for no man's heart is divided in the 
effort to serve two masters, but each has one 
single Master, Whom he serves with all his 
heart, and looks to this one Master to 
supply him with everything he needs ; he has 
but to ask, and all that is good for him is 



158 THE WAY 

his. Thus all the laws that govern the re- 
lations of man to man within the bounds 
of this society can be reduced to the single 
maxim, "Whatsoever ye would that men 
should do unto you, do ye even so to them." 
All this is possible, however, only because 
the State which Christ is describing is the 
kingdom of God, in which every man trusts 
his King and loves Him and renders Him 
the full allegiance of his heart. It is the 
picture of a society in which the law of love 
to God and man has worked out into human 
life. 

Here, then, is the whole law of the king- 
dom, in its outlines. We can fill in a detail 
here and there from other parts of the 
Saviour's teaching; we can make it more 
complete, if we compare with it the teaching 
of St. Paul and of St. John; but this does 
not change the main features of it in any 
way. The picture, as Jesus drew it, is all 
we need to have. 

Now everybody knows that no such society 
has ever existed anywhere in the world. In- 
deed there are some very good Christians 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD 159 

who believe that no such society is possible. 
They would explain all that Jesus has said 
about the kingdom as merely a prophecy of 
another world. Of course it is a prophecy; 
Christians are glad to believe that heaven 
will be just such a society as that which 
Jesus has described. But the law of the 
kingdom does bind the consciences of Chris- 
tians now. It does not wait for the time 
when Christ shall come to be our Judge. If 
we believe the prophecy, we are bound to 
work for the fulfilment of it; if we believe 
that the law of the kingdom is the law of 
God, we are bound to live by that law here 
and now. We pray, "Thy kingdom come," 
and if the prayer is genuine we must live 
for the answering of it. It was a Christian of 
deep insight who explained this prayer by 
saying, "God's kingdom comes, indeed, with- 
out our prayer, but we pray, in this petition, 
that it may come unto us also"; and then 
added, "This happens when our heavenly 
Father gives us His Holy Spirit, so that we 
believe His Holy Word, and lead a godly 
life here on earth, and in heaven everlast- 
ingly." 



160 THE WAY 

If we look at the world around us, we 
can see that there are great forces even now 
at work for the establishment of God's 
kingdom upon earth. If that kingdom is a 
society in which all men do the will of God, 
then every power that helps the world to- 
ward the will of God must be helping to 
bring His kingdom. God works in so many 
ways, that we cannot limit our thought of 
His activity to any one kind of force. When 
we look back upon the time in which the 
Saviour lived, we can see that the rise and 
fall of empires, the thoughts of men who 
had never heard of Israel's God, even the 
spread of false religions, had been prepar- 
ing the way for the advent of the Son of 
God. And so, in the days that have passed 
since Jesus lived on earth, there have been 
many forces working for the coming of the 
kingdom. They have not all been consciously 
directed to that end; some of them have 
seemed, at times, to be working in the oppo- 
site direction; but God has been using them 
all the time for His own purpose. We can 
say with certainty that every society in which 
men live close to one another may become 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD 161 

a force, in the hand of God for bringing 
His kingdom a little nearer. As we think 
of these societies there are three that stand 
out above all the rest. 

One of them is the State, It is the human 
institution through which the will of God 
can be made effective upon the outward lives 
of men. It limits and controls men's con- 
duct from the outside. It forbids actions 
that are harmful to other men and directs 
men's conduct toward the common good. 
The State had done this, of course, before 
Christ came ; it has been doing it ever since. 
It has taken many forms; monarchy, auto- 
cracy, oligarchy, aristocracy, democracy are 
names that are on everybody's lips these 
days. Most recently men have been talking 
about the socialistic State and even of 
"anarchy" as possible forms of organiza- 
tion. But all of these forms, even anarchy, 
have this one thing in common, — they are a 
means by which people are controlled; they 
give the daily life of men an organization 
through which some will — the will of the 
people or the will of the ruler or the will 
of a ruling class — can be made effective. 



162 THE WAY 

Of course, it is not possible for any State 
to be the kingdom of God on earth. It lies 
in the very nature of the kingdom that it 
must control men's lives from within, not 
from without. But the State does provide a 
means by which the law of the kingdom can 
be outwardly applied to human conduct. It 
can say, "Thou shalt not kill," though it 
cannot say, "Thou shalt not hate"; it can 
say, "Thou shalt not steal," though it can- 
not say, "Thou shalt not be dishonest." 

In every State — whether it be an empire, 
a kingdom or a republic — the citizens of the 
Kingdom of God, who live within it, are a 
"salt," preserving and seasoning the mass; 18 
they are a "leaven," leavening the whole 
lump. 19 The completeness with which the 
lump is "leavened," and the mass "salted" 
can be measured by the things that the State 
is trying to do, by the relations it maintains 
among its citizens, by the way that it acts 
toward other States. For Christ's word, 
"Ye shall know them by their fruits" 20 ap- 
plies to societies and governments, as well 

"Matthew v, 13. "Matthew xiii, 33. 
30 Matthew vii, 16. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD 163 

as to men. Every Christian must find his 
idea of the perfect State in Christ's teach- 
ing about the Kingdom of God. He is in 
duty bound to use every effort to make the 
State in which he lives as like the kingdom 
as may be possible. 

Another of these associations is the 
Family. It is the oldest of human institu- 
tions, older than the State. The book of 
Genesis tells us that in the beginning God 
decreed that man should not be alone. He 
gave him a woman to be his comrade, and 
man and woman are the beginning of the 
family. Out of their comradeship new rela- 
tions arise, — the relation of children and 
parents, brothers and sisters. They are the 
closest relationships that the world can know. 

For that reason Jesus used them to des- 
cribe the relations that exist in the Kingdom 
of God. When He spoke of His own rela- 
tion to the God Whom men had known 
before He came, He used the words 
"Father" and "Son" to describe it. Father 
of Christ, in the common meaning of the 
word, God could not be; Son of God, in the 
common meaning of the word, Christ could 



164 THE WAY 

not be; but "father" and "son" were the 
only words in human language which could 
even suggest the nearness of Christ to Him 
Whom He called Father. So, when He 
spoke of the relation of men to one another 
and to God within the kingdom, He used 
the words, "Father," "children," "brothers." 
That use of the words runs all through the 
Sermon on the Mount. When the King's 
subjects speak to Him, they are to say, "Our 
Father, Who art in heaven." They are not 
to worry about food and clothing, "for your 
heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need 
of all these things." 21 The man who lives 
in the kingdom must think of every other 
as his "brother," and treat him as a brother 
should be treated. The apostles caught this 
idea from their Master. All through the 
New Testament we find the same language 
used. St. Paul can write to the Ephesians 
about "the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ 
from Whom the whole family is named," 22 
and St. John can say, "Beloved, now are 
we the sons of God." 23 

21 Matthew vi, 32. " 2 Ephesians iii, 14, 15. 
"I John iii, 2. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD 165 

This continual use of family-words to 
describe the life of the Kingdom of God 
must give peculiar sacredness to a Chris- 
tian's idea of the family. Surely if there is 
any place on earth where the will of God 
can rule the lives of men and women, it 
must be in that circle where the lives of 
parent and child and brother and sister meet 
in closest contact and flow together to form 
a single common life. It is in such a group 
that the law of love can find its purest and 
most complete expression; and when that 
family-life is nourished by a living faith in 
Christ and in God, for Christ's sake, it offers 
a truer picture of the kingdom of God than 
any other that the world can know. It is 
easier than for any other human institution 
for the family to be the kingdom of God 
in miniature. Thus the family helps to bring 
the kingdom. For the kingdom comes with 
the touch of human life on human life, under 
the will of God. 

There is a third great agency by which 
God brings His kingdom here on earth. It 
is the Church, and the Church is the most 
important of them all. For the Church is 



166 THE WAY 

the association of men and women who be- 
lieve in Jesus and hope and pray and labor 
for the coming of His kingdom. 24 The aims 
of the State are earthly, and therefore tem- 
porary; it has to do with outward things, — 
with conduct, not with character; with law, 
not with motive; with force, not with con- 
viction. But the aims of the Church are 
spiritual, and therefore permanent; it deals 
with the inward things, — with beliefs and 
hopes and desires, with all the things that 
mould men's lives from within. It witnesses 
to Christ and proclaims His law of love. It 
labors to carry conviction to the hearts and 
souls of men, to touch them in their con- 
sciences and fill them with faith. If the State 
is an agency of the kingdom of God, it is 
because the spirit of the Gospel has grown 
into it, at least a little way; if the family 
is bringing the rule of God a little nearer, 
it is because the influence of Jesus is work- 
ing there. And the Church is the messenger 
of that Gospel through which alone the 
purifying power of God works on the hearts 

24 For other meanings of the word "Church," see 
Chapter I. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD 167 

of men in the family and the State. 
It is this which gives the Church its 
supreme importance in the coming of the 
kingdom. Often it has been called the king- 
dom of God on earth, but that name is mis- 
leading, and therefore dangerous. More 
than once it has carried the Church into 
paths that led away from, instead of toward, 
its proper purpose. The Church's real power 
is lost as soon as it begins to lay its emphasis 
on outward things, — on organization, on 
conduct, on the use of force. That is why 
Church and State can never be united with- 
out injury to both. To preach and teach 
and confess the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and 
thus to lead men one by one into the king- 
dom of God, — that is the Church's mission. 
Then these "children of the kingdom," liv- 
ing in families, living under and forming 
a part of earthly governments, mingling 
with other men in associations of every 
kind, become the "salt of the earth," which 
keeps human society from rotting away and 
dying of its own selfishness, the "leaven," 
which spreads the qualities of the kingdom 
into all the relations of life. 



CHAPTER XII 

The Christian Hope 

The religion of Jesus Christ is a religion 
of hope. Jesus taught His disciples to look 
forward. When He parted from them He left 
with them more than one promise that had 
not been fulfilled, and when they preached 
to other men they gave them these same 
promises as a part of Christ's Gospel. So 
the promises of Jesus passed permanently 
into His religion. Until the things He prom- 
ised have actually come to pass, Christians 
will always be waiting for them. This is 
their hope. It is not just a deep desire or 
a great longing. It is rather a part of their 
faith in Christ and in the Father, Whom 
He has taught them to love and trust. Ex- 
pectation is so much a part of their religion 
that if it were destroyed, the religion itself 
would die. That is what St. Paul felt when 
he wrote, "If in this life only we have hope 
in Christ, we are of all men most miser- 
168 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 169 

able." 1 What, then, are those things that 
Jesus has taught us? 

It is easy to sum them all up in a single 
phrase, — Christians look for the coming of 
the kingdom of God. There will be a time 
when the life of man will actually be the 
kind of life that Jesus described when He 
spoke about the kingdom. 2 There will be a 
time when all the sin and all the wrong and 
all the evil that we see around us and within 
us here will be entirely gone, and all the 
men and women who have entered the king- 
dom will live together under the kingdom's 
law of love. Jesus never said whether this 
completed kingdom would be here upon this 
earth or in a new-made world that shall 
take the place of this one, nor did He ever 
say when all this would come to pass; but 
He did teach very clearly that when it came 
it would be only the completion of what He 
had already begun. "The kingdom is here/' 
was the declaration He was always making; 
"The kingdom will come" was the promise 
He was always giving. 

Again, every Christian believes that, when 
1 1 Corinthians xv, 19. 2 See Chapter XI. 



170 THE WAY 

the kingdom is completed, it will be Christ 
Himself Who will complete it. Jesus Him- 
self spoke of that very often. He told His 
disciples that He would come again and take 
them unto Himself 3 ; He told His enemies 
that they would see Him "coming with 
power and great glory," 4 the angels of the 
Ascension said, "This same Jesus shall come 
again." 5 And so the hope of Christ's return 
passed into the preaching of the earliest 
Christian missionaries as one of the most 
important parts of the message they had to 
preach. 

How important they considered it, is easy 
to see from the number of times it is men- 
tioned in the books of the New Testament. 
There is scarcely another single subject 
which has so large a place in the words of 
Jesus which the Gospels have preserved, and 
there is not a writer of the New Testament 
who does not have something to say about 
the return of Christ. They speak of it again 
and again. Jesus is coming to fulfil all the 
unfulfilled promises, to finish all the unfin- 

3 John xiv, 2, 3, 28 ; cf. xvi, i6f f . 
* Matthew xxiv, 30. 5 Acts i, II. 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 171 

ished part of His work. Here and there, in 
the first-written books, it appears that these 
earliest Christians were expecting Him to 
come immediately. He might come any day; 
He must come soon. They remind them- 
selves of words of Christ Himself, — "Watch 
ye, therefore, for ye know not the day or the 
hour when the Son of Man cometh," 6 
"Blessed are those servants whom their 
Lord, when He cometh, shall find watch- 
ing." 7 St. Paul numbers himself and the 
readers of his Thessalonian letter among 
those who may hope to see it all. 8 But as 
time went on and still the promise was not 
fulfilled, many became impatient and some 
began to doubt. "Where is the promise of 
His coming?" they began to ask. 9 That same 
history has often been repeated. At times 
the hope of the Second Advent of Christ 
has flamed up, vivid and intense; at other 
times it has been faint and far away. But the 
promise of Jesus has never been forgotten, 
and the belief that He will come again has 
always been a part of the Christian hope. 

I 6 Matthew xxiv, 42 ; cf. xxv. 7 Luke xii, 37. 
8 1 Thessalonians iv, 17. 9 II Peter iii, 4. 



172 THE WAY 

About the time and the manner of His 
coming there have been many curious ques- 
tionings. Men have read the book of Reve- 
lation and the twenty-fourth chapter of St. 
Matthew, and have thought to prophesy 
from them. They have believed that 
they could fix the year, almost the very day, 
when He should come. Especially in times 
of great disturbance, when the world has 
been full of war, when revolutions have con- 
vulsed the social order, when everywhere 
there has been "distress of nations, with per- 
plexity," 10 some men have thought that these 
were signs that the second advent of Christ 
was near. It is not surprising that we should 
find in our own days many such believers in 
the speedy ending of the world. But Jesus 
said, "Of that day and hour knoweth no one, 
not even the angels of heaven, neither the 
Son, but the Father only"; 11 "As the light- 
ning, so shall be the coming of the Son of 
Man be"; 12 "In an hour when ye think not, 
the Son of Man cometh" ; 13 and the Apostles, 
remembering one of the words of Jesus, 

10 Luke xxi, 25. u Matthew xxiv, 27. 

11 Matthew xxiv, 36. 13 Matthew xxiv, 44. 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 173 

wrote, u The day of the Lord shall so come 
as a thief in the night." 14 

In Christ's own teaching His Second Ad- 
vent is always Spoken of as a time of judg- 
ment. It must be that, if it is to bring the 
completion of the kingdom of God. The 
word that decides who shall be admitted to 
the kingdom also decides who shall be kept 
out. The one class must be separated from 
the other. The unfaithful servants must be 
sorted out from among the faithful, the 
tares from among the wheat, the goats from 
among the sheep, the bad from among the 
good. 15 The enemies of the kingdom must 
suffer the penalty of defeat. Good must 
triumph over evil. In all this there is noth- 
ing hard or cruel, there is no revenge nor 
any hatred. It is a decision that has to be 
made. Indeed, the decision has been made 
already by those who are to be judged, and 
Jesus always bade His followers look for- 
ward to the day of judgment as a time of 
joy. It is to be for them a marriage-feast, 

14 Matthew xxiv, 43 ; II Thessalonians v, 22 ; II Peter 
iii, 4. ff. 

"Matthew xxiv, 45ff. ; xiii, 30; xxv, 32; xiii, 49. 



174 THE WAY 

a great supper, the entrance of the servant 
into "the joy of his Lord." 16 

But very early in the history of the Gospel, 
men began to ask some questions about all 
this. They began to ask, u How about the 
dead? How about those Christians who 
have waited in vain for Christ's return to 
take them to Himself? Are they outside the 
kingdom? If we shall die before Christ 
comes, shall we be excluded from the glory 
of it? Or will there be some way for all 
of us to share Christ's joy?" 

Those were questions that St. Paul had 
to meet. 17 He had his answer ready. Those 
who have died, he says, will have the same 
part in Christ's kingdom as those that shall 
"remain unto the coming of the Lord." For 
there will be a resurrection of the dead. No 
Christian need fear that death will "separate 
him from the love of Christ." 18 Jesus Him- 
self went down to death, but rose again, to 
live forever. He has become "the first- 
fruits of them that slept." 19 He has said, 

16 Matthew xxv, i-io, 21, 23; xxii, 2-14. 

17 1 Thessalonians iv, I3f f. ; I Corinthians xv, 12. 

15 Romans viii, 38, 39. " I Corinthians xv, 20. 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 175 

"Because I live, ye shall live also." 20 Men 
who believe in Jesus' resurrection will never 
be afraid of death. They know it cannot 
keep them out of the kingdom of God. The 
loyalty of faith that binds us to Christ, binds 
us to Him forever, and our relation to the 
kingdom, once it has been formed, is a rela- 
tion that only our own wilful desertion of 
the kingdom can destroy. The assurance of 
a life of blessedness with Christ is the very 
heart and center of the Christian hope. 

About this future resurrection, too, there 
have been many speculations. Even in St. 
Paul's day Christians were asking, "How 
are the dead raised up, and with what body 
do they come?" The Apostle's answer was, 
"Thou fool!" Then he goes on to say that 
all we know about this body of the resurrec- 
tion is that it will be a "spiritual" body. 
"It is sown in corruption, it is raised in 
incorruption, it is sown in dishonor, it is 
raised in honor; it is sown in weakness, it 
is raised in power ; it is sown a natural body, 
it is raised a spiritual body — and as we have 
borne the image of the earthy, we shall 

90 John xiv, 19. 



176 THE WAY 

also bear the image of the heavenly." 21 
And those are but a few of the many 
questions that men are always asking and 
have been for nineteen hundred years. They 
say, "Where are the dead before the resur- 
rection? What is their condition? Are they 
conscious? Are they happy?" Jesus gives 
us no plain answer. Only twice, in all His 
written sayings, has He dropped a hint of 
it. In the parable of the Rich Man and 
Lazarus, He suggests that there are differ- 
ences among the dead, even before the day 
of judgment; 22 in His word to the dying 
thief, He makes it clear that those who have 
been loyal to Him here are with Him, where 
He is. 23 St. Paul speaks of the dead as 
"those that have fallen asleep" 24 and says 
of himself that he has u a desire to depart 
and be with Christ, which is far better" than 
u to abide in the flesh." 25 

Men ask again, "Can the dead look back? 
Are they conscious of what is happening 
here? Are they, perhaps, trying to send 

31 1 Corinthians xv, 35-49. 22 Luke xvi, 22-26. 

n Luke xxiii, 43. 

34 1 Corinthians xv, 6, 18; I Thessalonians iv, 13, 15. 

n Philippians i, 2^. 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 177 

messages back across the barrier of death 
to those whom they have left behind ?" It 
is wrong for Christians to make light of 
these questions. To those that ask them they 
are many times the anxious inquiries of 
hearts that are ready to break with sorrow; 
but Christ is silent, and we can only say with 
St. Paul, "Now I see in a glass, darkly, but 
then face to face; now I know in part, but 
then shall I know, even as also I am 
known." 26 And so it is with those other 
questionings about the life that will precede 
and follow the final judgment, — about the 
streets and walls and gates of "the Holy 
City, New Jerusalem," 27 about the thousand 
years' reign of Christ here on the earth. 28 
For none of these things has any deep 
significance in the Christian hope. It centers 
around the kingdom of God, which is 
already here, and is one day to be com- 
pleted. That hope of ours is a deep and 
unshakable conviction that all of those who 
have loyally accepted here the lordship of 
Jesus Christ, who have taken His yoke upon 

28 1 Corinthians xiii, 12. * Revelation xxi, xxii. 
K Revelation xx, 2-7. 



178 THE WAY 

them and learned of Him, who have come, 
through Him, to the Father and become 
willing to trust the Father's love in every- 
thing, who have received into themselves the 
actual presence of God the Holy Ghost, the 
Helper and the Sanctifier, — that all of these 
will come into the kingdom, and that none 
of them will fail, because of death or 
"any other creature, " to enter the bless- 
sedness of heaven. About all these other 
things a Christian may say courageously, "I 
do not know." The American poet, who had 
missed, indeed, the fullness of the Christian 
faith, had caught the true spirit of the Chris- 
tian hope, when he sang, 

"I know not where His islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air; 
I only know I cannot drift 
Beyond His love and care." 






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